cursor blink

[mark-summerfield]

Is it possible to switch off cursor blink for a textual application?
Some people (including me) can't work with blinking cursors.
See, for example, https://jurta.org/en/prog/noblink

[davep]

Do you mean specifically within an Input widget, or more generally in the application? If the former, see the cursor_blink reactive attribute; if the latter, that will likely be a problem with your environment because Textual turns off the terminal cursor.

[mark-summerfield]

I already have cursor blink off in my xterm (xfce4-terminal) but in the demo (python3 -m textual) when I click the Username line editor the cursor is blinking which makes it unusable for me.
I lookup up the docs you linked to and modified the input example:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Input

class InputApp(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield Input(placeholder="First Name", cursor_blink=False)
        yield Input(placeholder="Last Name", cursor_blink=False)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = InputApp()
    app.run()

But this produces errors:

TypeError: InputApp(title='InputApp', classes={'-dark-mode'}) compose() method returned an invalid result; __init__() got an unexpected keyword argument 'cursor_blink'

Oddly, both placeholder and cursor_blink are listed as "reactive attributes" https://textual.textualize.io/widgets/input/#__tabbed_1_2 but only the former seems to be accepted.
Mind you, what I'd prefer is to be able to switch off cursor blink globally for the whole application.

[davep]

Yes, cursor_blink is a reactive attribute, but not a parameter of __init__; placeholder is both.

There isn't currently a single global setting for Input blink though.

[mark-summerfield]

Thanks for that info. So it is possible to stop cursor blink, but has to be done per-widget. Here's a version of the example that does so:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Input

class InputApp(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        nameInput = Input(placeholder="First Name")
        nameInput.cursor_blink = False
        yield nameInput
        nameInput = Input(placeholder="Last Name")
        nameInput.cursor_blink = False
        yield nameInput

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app = InputApp()
    app.run()

[davep]

Another approach would be to set the default value for Input.cursor_blink on application startup, so all Inputs would be created with that setting. For example:

from textual.app import App, ComposeResult
from textual.widgets import Input

class InputApp(App):
    def compose(self) -> ComposeResult:
        yield Input(placeholder="First Name")
        yield Input(placeholder="Last Name")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    Input.cursor_blink = False
    app = InputApp()
    app.run()

[willmcgugan]

I'm not apposed to adding an env var to disable blinking. We're planning something similar for animation.