togglecursor

This plugin aims to provide the ability to change the cursor when entering Vim's insert mode on terminals that support it. Currently, that's limited to iTerm, Konsole, and xterm is partially supported (creates an underline cursor instead of line, by default).

Installation

Unzip into ~/.vim (or %USERPROFILE%\vimfiles on Windows). You may also install it under pathogen by extracting it into it's own directory under bundle, such as ~/.vim/bundle/vim-togglecursor.

The latest version can be obtained from: https://github.com/jszakmeister/vim-togglecursor

Terminal Support

Togglecursor supports a number of terminals at this point: Konsole, xterm, kitty, iTerm, and pretty much anything that uses VTE under the hood. If your favorite terminal is not supported, it's pretty easy to do without modifying Togglecursor. The general outline is:

" Do whatever is needed to detect your terminal.  Many times, this is
" a simple check of the $TERM or $TERM_PROGRAM environment variables.
if $TERM == 'my-terminal'
    " Set the kind of escape sequences to use.  Most use xterm-style
    " escaping, there are a few that use the iterm (CursorShape) style
    " sequences.  The two acceptable values to use here are: 'xterm'
    " and 'iterm'.
    let g:togglecursor_force = 'xterm'
endif

Do this detection before the plugin is activated. Togglecursor will see the variable on load and proceed to use that style of escape sequences to change the cursor. This also works well if you happen to be running on a system that doesn't have your favorite shell available since it will fallback to Togglecursor's internal detection algorithm.

Note: looking for "xterm" in $TERM is not a good approach. Many terminals will set TERM to xterm or xterm-256color, but don't support the escape sequences to change the cursor. It's better to look for something unique to the terminal application in the environment.