blinking is evil

[Michael Hennebry]

On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Nifty Fedora Mitch wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 09:38:35AM -0600, Michael Hennebry wrote:
>> After updating to Fedora 9, I used vi on an old mailbox.
>> Most of the header lines were blinking at me.
>> What's going on?
>> How do I make it stop?
>> If I find the inventor of blinking text,
>> how slowly should I kill him?
>>
>
> You have to go back to before the invention of the VT-100 terminal
> to discover the inventor of blinking text.

Is he still dead?

> I think the issue is the alias for vi
> $ alias vi
> alias vi='vim'

Yup.
I don't have a real vi.

> $ su -
> # alias vi
> -bash: alias: vi: not found
> # which vi
> /bin/vi
>
> Vim is a smarter version of vi and has syntax driven
> display atributes.  It will color text as per the terminfo
> file and your preferences.
>
> Since I do not see blinking look at the terminal window you
> have and tell us which one you are using i.e.  help --> about
>
> It may be as simple as using "Terminal" in contrast to "Gnome Terminal"...
> Or better yet use gvim and click Syntax-->Off;  in vim you should be
> able to ":syn off" as well.

Thanks much.
I'm using xterm for a command line and whatever
gvim gives me when it starts from konqueror.
.../x/xterm is a compiled terminfo file.

I should have though of syntax.
Blinking text does not do good things to my brain.

Most of the time syntax is good thing,
so I don't want to turn it off generally.
Just knowing :syn off is sufficient, though not excellent.
Turning off blinking generally would be a good thing.
If I went through all the vim syntax files and removed all
the blinks and use_blinks, would that do the trick for gvim?

> See my first google hit:
>  http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/disable-syntax-highlighting-in-vim/
> and also the obvious vim home site stuff:
>  http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/syntax.html

-- 
Michael   hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu
"Pessimist: The glass is half empty.
Optimist:   The glass is half full.
Engineer:   The glass is twice as big as it needs to be."