vim: cursor not blinking by default

Question

I installed vim, I opened it, and I found the cursor is not blinking. Is that the behavior by default?

How can I make it blink?

Ubuntu 12.04, vim 7.3.429.

Answer 1

That's a terminal setting, it has nothing to do with Vim. Many people find a blinking cursor distracting there, that's why it's probably off by default.

When you're working locally on the same box (i.e. without remote access), I would recommend using GVIM, the graphical version of Vim. Though it generally looks and behaves the same as console Vim, it has some nice visual features (like undercurling spell errors), supports some more key combinations for mappings, and avoids some problems with pasting text. In GVIM, you can influence the cursor, cp. :help 'guicursor'.