A few people know I am a vim aficionado, and I figured I could share a little bit of my vim knowledge on this blog. While browsing the r/vim subreddit a while ago I found a little piece of vim configuration that lets you have a vertical bar for the cursor in terminal vim, using gnome-terminal as a terminal emulator.

Without further ado, here’s the snippet, which you can put in your .vimrc, for example.

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if has("autocmd") && has('GUI_GTK')
  au InsertEnter * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape ibeam"
  au InsertLeave * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape block"
  au VimLeave * silent execute "!gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/gnome-terminal/profiles/Default/cursor_shape block"
endif

Those of you using gvim might already have this, since the feature is builtin and might only need to be enabled.

If you use gnome-terminal in Linux, on the other hand, this is not natively supported, and it might be on your nice-to-have list, especially if you use tmux.