Is there any way to disable the blinding cursors? in MacOS.

[MarjaE]

Hi,

I know there didn’t used to be. I have visual processing issues and cannot see near any kind of flashing or blinking, and can get awful migraines and nausea from it.

I can’t see any text I’m typing in Draw, Writer, or Calc, or any objects I’m moving in LibreOffice Draw.

I mostly stopped using LibreOffice because of the blinding cursors, but I haven’t found any drawing software that lets me see the screen while working, and it’s important to be able to see the screen. I use related writing software which doesn’t have this bug.

There is no system-wide setting for cursor rates in MacOS. (P.S. The defaults write fix only works for some cursors in some applications.)

[keme]

“*… the blinding cursors … *”

I assume that “blinding” is a typo on “blinking”.

Also assuming that you use a Mac, since you mention settings in MacOS (so I added a tag for that).

[MarjaE]

Thank you.

It’s both blinking and blinding for me.

[mikekaganski]

Using argumentative “blinding” does not help anyone: not those who see the question and try to understand what aspect of the problem is inappropriate to you; nor for others struggling with the same problem and googling for “blinking” - and not finding your question naturally.

[keme]

There is a system wide setting for cursor blink, but it seems to not be available from Settings app. You have to change it by written commands (in a terminal window).

Start the Terminal app (commonly found in “Applications\Utilities” if I recall correctly)

Paste the following commands:

defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOn -float 999
defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOff -float 1

This will make the cursor blink momentarily off once a second, but the off time is so short you probably will not notice it (considerably shorter than a typical screen refresh cycle). You can also try to set the periods to zero to disable blinking altogether.

Reportedly, not all applications respect the system settings for cursor behavior. I am not at my Mac right now, so I cannot test whether LibreOffice does that on a Mac, nor whether the “zero blink” alternative I mentioned is valid.

To revert to defaults, use the following commands:

defaults delete -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOn
defaults delete -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriodOff

Info source:

Change OS X text cursor blink rate

[MarjaE]

It only works in NSText.

So it doesn’t work at all in LibreOffice or OpenOffice, and only works with text in NeoOffice, not addressing blinking/blinding flashing around some selected objects in NO Draw, selected cells in NO Calc, etc.

defaults write -g NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod 10000 is sometimes also necessary.

I use 10000 for all 3 settings.

[mikekaganski]

If there is a system setting that LibreOffice does not follow, then it’s a bug which you should file for it had a chance to be fixed. Thanks.

[mikekaganski]

Very fast blinking cursor: LO 7.0 macOS Mojave suggests that at least LibreOffice 6.4 does take the system setting into account.

[vessels-enraged]

keme’s suggested commands worked for me while I had the same issue on M1 macOS 12.2.1 and LibreOffice 7.3.1
It doesn’t seem like the cursor repeat settings are available in macOS’s System Preferences. I believe the bug could be reproducible if the two defaults keys have OOTB values - I forgot to check them before deleting the keys, and the issue is still gone… Odd.