Can't remove cursor blinking in console mode

Question

Emacs 24.3.1, OS: Linux Slackware 14.1.

In my ~/.bash_profile file I have the following:

# If on console, change cursor colour according to
# /usr/src/linux/Documentation/VGA-softcursor.txt
# Reset using echo -e '\033[?2c'
if [ $TERM = 'linux' -a $SHELL == '/bin/bash' ] ; then
    echo -e '\033[?17;0;64c'
fi

This makes cursor non-blinking and makes it red. When I start Emacs the cursor becomes a blinking dash.

In Displaying the Cursor chapter I read this:

On a text terminal, the cursor’s appearance is controlled by the terminal, largely out of the control of Emacs. Some terminals offer two different cursors: a “visible” static cursor, and a “very visible” blinking cursor. By default, Emacs uses the very visible cursor, and switches to it when you start or resume Emacs. If the variable visible-cursor is nil when Emacs starts or resumes, it uses the normal cursor.

So in ~/.emacs I wrote:

(setq visible-cursor nil)

And restarted Emacs. But it didn't help: the cursor is still blinking, and when I close Emacs it destroys my previous non-blinking cursor.

How to fix?

Answer 1

This is an old question but I ran to this issue just today, in Debian 10. Terminals used are Konsole in Debian on the metal and wsltty in WSL.

For me setting visible-cursor variable to nil worked. The cursor stopped blinking in terminal Emacs. Outside of Emacs, the cursor was not blinking anyway since that's what I had configured. blink-cursor-mode was off already too.