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First of all, this question is not about the mouse cursor, and not about cursor shapes in a terminal or console. I want to configure the shape of the cursor while typing e.g. while typing this question in the online editor. Most of the questions I found while researching are all related to either mouse pointer or cursor shape in a terminal.

The sort of options I am looking for are: for increasing the width of the vertical line, change it to a rectangular block or a horizontal line. These options exist for the terminal, vi, emacs, but not for other editors such as Libreoffice, Joplin editor, online editors that open in a browser, etc.

The default settings in gnome settings give options only for changing the size of the mouse cursor.

I am currently using the latest Pop OS 20.10.

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2 Answers 2

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Based on the clue given by @sebastian and a little bit of research I found out from https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/153104/lo-writer-on-linux-change-appearance-of-typing-cursor-ie-not-mouse-cursor/ how to edit and configure caret shape. Now I know this is actually called caret and not cursor. We called it a cursor in the olden days.

I edited the file ".config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css" and inserted the following line

* { -GtkWidget-cursor-aspect-ratio: 0.2; }

This solved the problem in LibreOffice, Zotero, Firefox. But not for Chrome Browser. May be chrome browser does not use gtk.

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  • I am using Xfce 4.16, gtk-3. I did the above mentioned steps. As you have said, only LibreOffice, Firefox changed the caret size but not in Xfce DE apps such as MousePad, WhiskerMenu, Application Finder, CatFish etc. Any workaround??
    – vrgovinda
    Apr 28, 2023 at 6:30
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There is no universal setting for the text cursor size. For GNOME/gtk3 programs you should be able to change it by editing ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini and changing it to:

[Settings]
gtk-cursor-aspect-ratio=0.12

This however is currently broken: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3441

On gtk versions older than 3.24.21 this was a CSS property instead of a setting, but since Pop!_OS ships a newer version, those properties won't apply anymore either.

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  • If it is to be done through CSS the w3c page shows the following options. This is what I need. Now I need to find out how to change CSS properties. w3.org/TR/css-ui-4/#caret-shape
    – G N
    Dec 5, 2020 at 12:45

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