Question

How to change caret (cursor) blinking rate in NetBeans? (7.0)

NetBeans developers say that this is supported as a Swing option, see Bug 124211 – Cursor blink rate too fast but I can’t figure out the name of this Swing option to set from the command line.

The closest example of setting Swing option that I found is setting look and feel by putting
-J-Dswing.defaultlaf=com.sun.java.swing.plaf.windows.WindowsLookAndFeel to the netbeans.conf.

Answer 1

There was a module for customizing the Cursor Blinking Rate created by Emilian Bold, but that module is not found easily available. Let me provide a less intuitive way but this solution works with NetBeans IDE 7.0.1 as tested by me.

1. Make sure the NetBeans IDE is shut down before making these changes.

2. Create file <userdir>/config/Editors/text/x-java/properties.xml
   Here the <userdir> means the User directory used by NetBeans IDE. This directory can be found from the NetBeans Help > About menu. The config folder will already be there in this directory but the folders Editors/text/x-java may not be there and we will have to create them, they are case sensitive. The properties.xml file shall also be created in the x-java folder.

3. Add the following contents to the properties.xml file

     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
     <!DOCTYPE properties PUBLIC "-//NetBeans//DTD Editor Properties settings
     1.0//EN" "http://www.netbeans.org/dtds/EditorProperties-1_0.dtd">
     <properties>
         <property class="java.lang.Integer" name="caret-blink-rate" value="0"/>
     </properties>  

1. The value=”0″ portion can be customized by desired blink rate in miliseconds, the default value used by NetBeans IDE is 300 in my opinion, but it can be changed with a new value, 0 will mean no blinking.

2. Start NetBeans IDE again and now you will get your desired blink rate for the cursor in Java files.