Re: Power: blink-cursor-mode is a pig

[Chong Yidong]

Daniel Colascione <address@hidden> writes:

> blink-cursor-mode uses an idle timer to activate a regular timer that
> blinks the cursor every 500ms.  While an Emacs frame has focus, we want
> this timer to run so that we can make the cursor blink.  The problem is
> that although the cursor stops blinking when Emacs loses focus, the
> timer keeps running because Emacs has no idea it lost focus and doesn't
> know it can turn off the timer.  The unnecessary Emacs wakeups caused by
> this timer waste power.

On the Gnome terminal, the cursor stops blinking after ten blinks
(edits, X window selection, and cursor motion cause the blinking to
resume).  I think this idea is a reasonable one for us copy, and it
would eliminate the power wasting problem.