How to set the foreground color of the cursor face?

Question

I tried to set the foreground color of the cursor face, but it does not seem to work. Setting the background color works fine, but setting the foreground color does not have any effect.

I would like Emacs to act in the same way as my terminal. When I move the cursor over the text the foreground color does not change.

When I do the same in Emacs the foreground color becomes white.

How can I stop Emacs inverting the text at the cursor?

Answer 1

Nope. M-x customize-option cursor shows you the doc string:

Basic face for the cursor color under X. Hide Currently, only the :background attribute is meaningful; all other attributes are ignored. The cursor foreground color is taken from the background color of the underlying text.

Note the last sentence.

Consider filing an enhancement request: M-x report-emacs-bug.

Answer 2

A workaround could be to change the cursor shape via the cursor-type, for example:

(setq cursor-type 'hollow)
(setq cursor-type 'bar)
(setq cursor-type 'hbar)

I know, it's a brutal change, but at least the foreground color is preserved.