Alter Word's cursor blink rate

30 April 2013, 02:58

Have you ever noticed that Microsoft Word on the Mac has a slower text cursor blink rate compared to the rest of the system? I’m not sure why this is but it means that it’s not hard to ‘lose’ the text cursor when editing a document — often I have to stare at the page until the cursor starts blinking again so that I know where it is.

Luckily, this can be fixed easily. Quit all Microsoft Office apps, then open a Terminal window (it’s in the Utilities list of the Applications list in Finder) and paste-in the following, which will match the cursor blink rate with that of the rest of the system (triple-click the line to select all of it before copying):

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod -int 500

If you want a really fast blinking cursor, like computers of old, try this instead:

defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod -int 100

To restore the default setting, again quit all Microsoft Office apps and type the following into a Terminal window:

defaults delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.Word.plist NSTextInsertionPointBlinkPeriod

Know better?

 
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