[FEATURE] Customise cursor style

Found 3 possible duplicate issues:

1. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16086
2. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/10215
3. https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/7002

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🤖 Generated with Claude Code

While this is a duplicate, the others were wrongly closed, so let's leave this open

+1 for the don't override cursor at all approach

I use ghostty terminal (macos) with cursor-style = underline and shell-integration-features = no-cursor,
But CC still overrides my cursor to a block via DECSCUSR escape sequences.

This respects the Unix philosophy of not overriding the user's terminal preferences.

+1

This would be a highly beneficial feature.
The conventional appearance of the terminal is a significant factor in a programmer's efficient work.
Many developers are accustomed to seeing not a block, but, for instance, a vertical bar.

I really want the ability to set my own cursor thanks

With multibyte characters such as Japanese, the block cursor obscures the character it sits on, making it hard to read. My terminal is set to a bar cursor for this reason, but Claude Code forces a block cursor with no option to change it, which degrades the UX.

I found another annoying side effect of this. Normally I can see if the terminal has focus or not by looking at the cursor. But Claude Code always shows the cursor even if the terminal does not have focus. Quite annoying.

This is the behavior of the underlying CUI library (ink) at work, so there is probably little claude-code can do about it.

Meanwhile, I wrote a small general-purpose terminal filter that can strip the fake cursor ink emits.
https://github.com/knu/tfil

+1 on Kitty / macOS. cursor_shape underline in kitty.conf is ignored — Claude Code 2.1.142 hides the real cursor and renders an inline reverse-video block via Ink. No DECSCUSR shape (\e[3 q / \e[4 q) reaches the emulator, so Kitty has nothing to draw. Fullscreen vs non-fullscreen makes no difference. Want the terminal's native underline caret, same as every other TUI on the system.

For context — the upstream fix path is on Ink itself: vadimdemedes/ink#251 (open since 2019) → PR vadimdemedes/ink#872 (open, declarative <Cursor /> component, merge-conflicts, ~5 weeks stale).

Even once #872 lands, Claude Code's input box would still need to swap the chalk.inverse fake cursor for <Cursor />. Because <Cursor /> can't render inline within <Text>, that's a real refactor — and for proper inline-text positioning it likely also needs the CURSOR_MARKER mechanism Google's Gemini CLI uses (they shipped it via a fork of Ink).

+1 — please respect the terminal's cursor config (color and shape) instead of overriding it.

+1, and: I'd like to customize separately the cursor in vim insert/normal mode.

Adding a macOS/Ghostty data point plus a working opt-out that already exists today, in case it helps others who land here while this is still open.

TL;DR

CLAUDE_CODE_ACCESSIBILITY=1 restores the native terminal cursor and makes the terminal's own cursor-style apply inside the prompt input. It's documented, but it's discoverable only if you already suspect accessibility — nothing about the name suggests "cursor shape", so most people hunting this problem will never find it.

// ~/.claude/settings.json
{ "env": { "CLAUDE_CODE_ACCESSIBILITY": "1" } }

Verified on Claude Code 2.1.212, Ghostty 1.3.1 (cursor-style = bar), macOS 26.5.2, installed via homebrew cask claude-code@latest. Thin bar cursor is back, and it survives restarts.

Why this is worth a config key anyway

The env var works, but it's a side door: it flips the renderer into full accessibility mode (screen-reader render paths, cursor parking) as a package deal. Users who just want a bar cursor shouldn't have to opt into screen-reader behavior to get it. A dedicated cursorShape setting (as proposed here) or simply honoring DECSCUSR would be the honest fix.

Mechanism

From the minified 2.1.212 bundle — best-effort reading, symbol names are mangled:

function Iwe(){                                   // -> passed to the renderer as { nativeCursor: Iwe() }
  if (ye.CLAUDE_CODE_ACCESSIBILITY) return true;  // short-circuits everything below
  if (TL()) return true;                          // screen reader enabled
  return !x5e() && _Vi();
}

function _Vi(){
  if (ye.CLAUDE_CODE_ACCESSIBILITY) return true;
  if (TL()) return true;
  if (ut(process.env.CLAUDE_CODE_NATIVE_CURSOR)) return true;
  return et("tengu_native_cursor", false);        // server-side feature gate
}

nativeCursor: false is what makes Claude Code draw its own inverse-video block and hide the real terminal cursor. CLAUDE_CODE_ACCESSIBILITY is the first line of Iwe(), so it overrides the gate, tui mode, and everything else.

Note CLAUDE_CODE_NATIVE_CURSOR only ever forces the value on — there's no env var to force it off, and no way to influence it from settings.json.

Things that do NOT work (so nobody repeats them)

• Editing cachedGrowthBookFeatures.tengu_native_cursor in ~/.claude.json — it's a cache of a server-side gate and gets overwritten. I set it to false, restarted, and it was back to true on the next launch. (This is step 1 of the workaround in #69591; it did not hold here.)
• CLAUDE_CODE_DECSTBM=1 — reading the code, this forces x5e() true, which makes Iwe() false. That disables the native cursor, i.e. it's the wrong direction and would lock the block cursor in.
• Terminal-side config — Ghostty's cursor-style = bar is correct and honored at the shell prompt; it simply doesn't reach the input because Claude Code isn't using the terminal cursor at all.

Related

#71371 (closed as duplicate of this one) describes the exact rendering behavior: "the prompt input renders the text cursor as a solid inverse-video block over the character at the caret position... Claude Code draws it directly, so the terminal's native cursor-shape setting doesn't apply." Also #69591, #61970, #16086, #10215.