Re-classifying this as an enhacement reqeust.

Moving to gnome-terminal ...

What is the purpose of this feature? I don't understand why it's
useful, and the prefs dialog is already insanely full, with a number
of genuinely useful options not included.

Xterm, RXVT, and Eterm have ways to change the color of the text
cursor.  With gnome terminal, it takes on the color of the last ANSI
color that was assigned.  It's a feature I've found in other terminals
and something I would like to see in gnome-terminal.  

Xterm: ~/.Xdefaults

    XTerm*cursorColor: yellow

Eterm: ~/.Eterm/themes/Eterm/theme.cfg

    foreground #aaaaaa
    background black
    cursor #ffff00
    cursor_text #880000

What I'm asking is why it's useful. The reason I'm asking is that I
need to weigh its importance relative to other things that could be
placed in the finite space of the configuration dialog. Right now I
don't understand why I would ever use this option or why the other
terminals have it.

I'm not saying it's not useful, I'm saying I personally don't know
what people use it for.

To have the cursor standout from the surrounding text.  This is
helpful when you're coding and have many termnials open so you can
quickly eyeball your term see where your cursor is because it stands
out.  This is especially helpful when you use smaller fonts.

If you go to the colors tab within gnome terminal preferences, Cursor
color would go:

  Color Scheme:           
  Fore/Background Color:  
  Foreground color:
  Background color:
  Cursor Color:           <--
  Color palette:

Just another dropdown... :)

I guess I'd really prefer to see a global desktop setting for the
cursor color. CC'ing jrb, he was working on that. TBD.

A global desktop setting for the cursor?  
Are you talking about the TEXT cursor or the MOUSE cursor?

The text cursor

Yep! but the last comment of Havoc make me think that he
was talking about the mouse cursor.

*** Bug 109632 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I'd like to have this too.  On a busy screen it can be hard to
immediately see where the cursor is, at least for "fullscreen" kind of
programs like text editors where the cursor can be anywhere on the
screen.  If you lose track of where the cursor is, it can take a few
seconds of visual searching to find the particular inverted block,
especially if there are reverse-video lines on the screen.  It was
particularly annoying me right now because my terminal was showing a
laggy SSH session where just moving the cursor to make it show up
would take a couple of seconds.

For this reason, other programs have colored or blinking cursors. 
It's not just candy.  There is a usability aspect.  (Dumbterms have
had it for 20 years now...)

I agree that it should probably be a desktop-wide setting.  Indeed
this bug could be half-fixed without adding any additional
configuration by just making it obey the "Cursor blinks in text boxes
and fields" setting in the Keyboard Preferences config applet.  Making
the cursor blink would make it easy to find, but some people
understandably find blinking objects annoying.

Setting color is a bit more problematic.  It probably ought to use
some kind of standard highlight color from the current theme. 
However, many people use different colors for their terminals than for
the rest of the desktop: I have a light GTK theme, but grey-on-black
terminals.  A color that looks good in GTK widgets might be no good in
the terminal.  Therefore I think it needs to be configurable as well.
 I'd suggest on the Colors page, an additional "Cursor color" inkwell,
which is conditioned on the "use colors from system theme" checkbox.

The cursor ought to stop blinking when the window loses focus, just as
it currently turns into an outline.

I may eventually write a patch for at least the blinking part, so I
would appreciate any comments.

Blink is already in of course.  Never mind me.

This trivial patch against 2.7.3 shows that support for colored cursors seems to
be working OK in libvte 0.11.11.  We just need to add a gnome-terminal interface
to turn it on.

(I don't propose this patch for inclusion.)

Created attachment 29153 [details] [review]
hardcode cursor to red

Created attachment 29154 [details]
proposed UI

Would it be OK to add an additional inkwell control to set the cursor color,
like this?

This would allow what's now possible with rxvt, xterm, etc.

A drawback is that people who want the cursor the same color as the text, and
don't want a standard theme would need to set both.

Note that one can drag the color from one color button to another.

I didn't know that.

In that case I think the UI burden on people who don't care about this is pretty
low, and it will make people who do want a colored cursor happy.  

If the interface is OK I'll finish off the patch.

Created attachment 32316 [details] [review]
patch to allow changing cursor color

Proposed patch to add this feature:

This adds a color well for the cursor in the preferences dialog.  It works for
me.

The patch attached adds a selector to the preferences page, as shown in the
dialog screenshot. 

Any chance of getting it merged?

Unhistorically marking this as a dup of 85821.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 85821 ***