Geany's cursor is a standard blinking line, however Geany automatically greys the paragraph being edited. Thus, the cursor becomes invisible in the paragraph being edited, ie Geany makes the cursor invisible precisely where it needs to be visible. This leads to repeated errors and inevitably to headaches, hair pulling and shouting. That is to say, to insanity.
I could find no setting in preferences addressing either: un-greying the paragraph being edited or highlighting the cursor. Thus my decades-reliable Geany editor became enigmatic and useless, and I didn't want alternative apps.
app build or app config?
There is a lot of information on cursor configuration, but is it build file configuration or configuration files for a user using the app? The difference is hard to determine, and slows down efforts to do either. In this case, I'm interested only in configuring an already-compiled running application.
solution
After several drinks to calm my nerves, I found this site and then went to /usr/share/geany/filedefs/filetypes.common (or less permanently to ~/.config/geany/geany.conf), to change the cursor, as directed in this post.
To make the cursor into a block, change the third argument (second to last) to "true", instead of "false". A small blinking block of that color -- all "f"'s for black, all "0"'s for white, or any hex color in between will result. Restart geany to experience the change.
# nano filetypes.common
# comment the original
# caret=caret
caret=0xffffff;0x0;false;false"
$ nano geany.conf
no idea
themes
Another avenue, though requires a download, is to change the color setup using themes.
~/.config/geany/colorschemes/Let's not overlook this, Britain in the 50's, if feeling low about Geany or anything else. And of course, Charlie.
