Life without a blinking cursor is much better, more peaceful, surprisingly calming. I never considered such a thing before reading the comments
here. I found an old thread on the dev alias, by Emilian Bold (
here), and now my cursor doesn't blink at all anymore.
Here's the whole module, with all the code (i.e., set blink rate per editor type) in its simplest implementation (i.e., without Options window extension):

Hoping to see this functionality (within the Options window) as a standard part of NetBeans IDE.
Thank you. Is there any settings to make the cursor a solid block instead of a line?
Hey Geertjan, glad I got you thinking about that blinking madness. ;-)
I just tried NB 6.8, and for the record: it's easy to turn the blinking off for Java files by editing .netbeans/6.8/config/Editors/text/x-java/Preferences/org-netbeans-modules-editor-settings-CustomPreferences.xml (at least on Linux; on Windows it's probably somewhere in the Application Data folder)) and adding:
<entry name="caret-blink-rate" xml:space="preserve">
<value><![CDATA[0]]></value>
</entry>
Of course it would be nicer if NB could read the system setting on your operating system, or if there was an option to explicitly set the blink rate in the appearances options.
Hi,
i followed your tutorial about the cursor of Netbeans to reduce the rate of blinking but it didnt work for me.
Should it work in 6.8?
Regards
Javi
also i followed your tutorial,but it didn't work for netBeans 6.8, do you have any ideas?
also i followed your tutorial in the x-java/org-netbeans-modules-editor-settings-CustomPreferences.xml, it works fine,but it didn't work in other language for example x-c,x-php5, do you have any ideas?
Doesn't work for 6.9. Big surprise. Why is it that no Java applications can respect native UI settings? It's no wonder Java is dying or that they're effectively throwing it off Mac.
Is it possible to alter the width of the caret also?