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Until today, when I was in the normal state in evil, the cursor was a block, and it would switch to an I-beam when in insert state. Something changed, however, and the cursor is now always the I-beam. How can I get the old behavior back?
More generally, how do I change the cursor appearance according to evil's different states?
The variable cursor-type controls how the appearance of the cursor, defaulting to t, which uses the cursor specified for the frame (see the docstring for options). If you'd like the cursor to default to a block, you can (setq cursor-type 'box).
However, evil provides a number of different cursors for the different states, which you can adjust to give you a visual reminder of what state you're in when you're typing:
evil-normal-state-cursorevil-insert-state-cursorevil-visual-state-cursorevil-motion-state-cursorevil-replace-state-cursorevil-operator-state-cursorThe docstring states that each of these:
May be a cursor type as per
cursor-type, a color string as passed toset-cursor-color, a zero-argument function for changing the cursor, or a list of the above.
So, for example, if you wanted a yellow bar 5 pixels wide in insert state and a purple-filled box in normal state, you could do the following:
(setq evil-insert-state-cursor '((bar . 5) "yellow")
evil-normal-state-cursor '(box "purple"))
See the docstring for cursor-type for your options in adjusting the cursor.
apropos. You can hitC-h a(apropos), type a search ("evil cursor"), and hitRETto find the documentation of any matching functions, variables, commands, etc. Helm has a built-in source for this as well:helm-apropos.apropos. Note, however, thatC-h ais bound toapropos-commandby default, which will only list matching commands. If you wantapropos-commandto consider non-interactive functions, you'll have to doC-uC-h a. Theaproposcommand (which will show both commands and variables) is not bound to a key by default.apropos-commandtoapropos-- turns out I had reboundC-h atoaproposa long time ago, forgot, and assumed it was the default.