How to make emacs cursor under Windows act like it used to under X?

Question

This is with (emacs-version)

"GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601)
 of 2011-03-10 on 3249CTO"

I suddenly noticed that the cursor is like a standard Windows caret, and the sort of editing I'm trying to do is making it hard for me to spot. I am digging for a way to make the cursor be a colored block (or outline block in inactive windows), the way it used to be in emacs 19, and coming up empty-handed.

Is there an incantation that will do this, or am I doomed to be disappointed?

ETA: this is emacs running natively on Windows, which I mistakenly thought would be evident from the emacs-version output. I am not interested in solutions involving cygwin, because that would not fit into my normal workflow.

I have GNU Emacs 24.1.1 on Windows here, and it uses block caret by default (wasn't it always that way?). Are you getting the thin caret with `emacs -Q`? — npostavs, Sep 28 '12 at 01:05

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 28 '12 at 01:10

2

Emacs will use the system caret if it detects that you are running some accessibility software on your PC. This is because such software does its job by tracking the system caret.

You can override this by setting w32-use-visible-system-caret to nil.

answered Sep 28 '12 at 01:10

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 27 '12 at 18:46

0

Are you running emacs on *NIX or Windows? Which OS if *NIX, and which window manager? Might be a .Xdefaults setting you could tweak, or something you can fiddle with on the X side if *NIX. On Windows, maybe you can use the Cygwin version of Emacs and tweak it that way.

answered Sep 27 '12 at 18:46

ShawnW.

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See edit to the post. Running emacs under cygwin is not a solution for me. – wades Sep 27 '12 at 19:45
maybe the answer is here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3670938/cursor-type-in-emacs – ShawnW. Sep 27 '12 at 20:06

How to make emacs cursor under Windows act like it used to under X?

2 Answers2