J.13 Displaying the Cursor

There are a number of ways to customize the display of the cursor. M-x hl-line-mode enables or disables a minor mode which highlights the line containing point. On window systems, the command M-x blink-cursor-mode turns on or off the blinking of the cursor. (On terminals, the terminal itself blinks the cursor, and Emacs has no control over it.)

You can customize the cursor's color, and whether it blinks, using the cursor Custom group (see section AD.2.2 Easy Customization Interface).

When displaying on a window system, Emacs can optionally draw the block cursor as wide as the character under the cursor--for example, if the cursor is on a tab character, it would cover the full width occupied by that tab character. To enable this feature, set the variable x-stretch-cursor to a non-nil value.

Normally, the cursor in non-selected windows is shown as a hollow box. To turn off cursor display in non-selected windows, customize the option cursor-in-non-selected-windows to assign it a nil value.