Most people never give their cursor a second thought. Cursor-Smith is for the ones who do: writers who want a screen worth staring at, anyone who keeps losing the caret and needs it bigger and brighter, and people who just like to customize things.

Every effect has its own switch, reduced motion is respected out of the box, and it's free.

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/7eab19cc-b7ac-4476-bc40-514b4e75cf61

What do you get?

The cursor itself

Box, Line or Underline, each with its own shape controls: serifs, hollow, outline width, the letter inside the block. Smooth movement so it glides between positions instead of jumping, with an adaptive boost when you're typing fast. Blinking you actually control: speed, on/off balance, fade, a don't-blink-while-typing mode, or a breathing cursor that swells and shrinks. Or no blink at all.

Separate colors for dark and light, multi-stop gradients, thickness, opacity, glow, translucency. And more. Much, much more.

Multiple cursors get the full treatment. Alt-click or Ctrl-D a few carets and every one of them is drawn, styled and animated like the first: smear, trail, fire, stardust, torch, all of it, per caret.

The effects

A dozen of them, from subtle to absurd.

Effect	What it does
Pop effects	Popping letters, backspace disintegration, thunderstrike on Enter, fireworks on Space. Rainbow sweeps them all around the color wheel together.
Pixel trail	A fading trail of pixels behind the cursor, with lifetime, size, gravity and jump-streak controls.
Stardust	Floating motes, drifting upward or orbiting the cursor like fireflies.
Bracket tether	Underlines the span between matching brackets or quotes. Nice for dialogue.
Motion smear	The corners lag on springs, stretching as it moves and snapping back when it arrives. Optional comet tail, a cap on how far the tail may trail, and a conserve-volume mode where a jump to another line thins as it stretches instead of ballooning.
Energy beam	Bands of light sliding or rippling through the cursor body, with an aurora mode.
CRT effect	Old-monitor phosphor ghosts, neon-tube and gradient variants, Signal glitch on long jumps.
Speed demon	Heats from grey to white-hot as you type, throwing sparks. Bring your own heat gradient.
Hot-head	Sets the text on fire, in chunky pixel-art flames. The fire spreads along the line, leaves a burning trail on the text you moved over, flares up around the caret when it jumps, and burns out when you stop.
Torch spotlight	Darkens the page except for a pool of warm light around the cursor, with a candle flicker.

Some effects unlock extra options when combined. Try Blinking with Torch and see what appears.

Torch spotlight

Two layers: a darkness that dims everything outside the pool, and a warm glow that adds light inside it. Glow strength controls the warm core, and at 0 you get a pure colorless spotlight. Flicker makes it gutter like a candle. The light follows the caret, the mouse, or whichever moved last, and can pulse with your blink. On desktop, Keep sidebars lit leaves the sidebars, tabs and ribbon at normal brightness.

Presets and sharing

Dial in a cursor, name it, save it. Load it, edit it, cycle through all of them with one command or a hotkey. Every preset gets a compact share code: copy it, send it to a friend, they paste it into Import preset and they've got your cursor.

Seven ship with the plugin so you've got something to start from:

Preset	Style	Vibe
Jell-O	Box	Smooth smear and glide with a mint-green glow
Torch-Crt	Line	Warm amber line with CRT trail and torch spotlight
mr.Blue	Line	Clean blinking blue line with smooth movement
FairyDust	Underline	Pale yellow underline with pixel trail and energy beam
DarkMatter	Box	Blue-purple box with CRT trail and Speed Demon sparks
old_Joe	Box	Understated grey box, no frills
FireBox	Box	Yellow box with a tapered smear, on fire, heating up as you type faster

Vim mode

Five modes, five cursors. Normal, Insert, Visual, Replace and Command each get their own style, color, blink and effects, fully independent. A -- NORMAL -- indicator sits in the status bar, Vim-style, tinted to match. Vim presets save the whole five-mode setup under one name and share with one code. Turn on Control Obsidian's Vim key bindings and switching modes flips Obsidian's native Vim setting for you.

Mode	When it applies
Normal	The default editing mode
Insert	After i, a, o and friends
Visual	After v, V, or Ctrl-v
Replace	After R
Command	The : / / prompt, plus the Command Palette, Quick Switcher, search boxes and other fields

Accessibility

Cursor-Smith is animation-heavy by design, so it takes reduced motion seriously. Respect reduced motion is on by default: when your system asks for it, every moving effect switches itself off and your cursor keeps its style, color, size and glow. Blinking is left alone, since it's the standard caret behaviour and well under flash thresholds, but it has its own switch.

For anyone who loses the caret: thickness, glow, high-contrast colors and a bigger box are all here, and they work with every effect off.

Performance

The plugin only ever repaints a small area around the caret, sized to whatever effect is running, and drops to a slow heartbeat when nothing is moving. If Obsidian still feels slower with it on, or you're on battery, Low power mode halves every effect's frame rate.

If something is off, run the Performance report command: it measures ten seconds of normal typing and copies a short report to your clipboard. Paste it into an issue and it tells me exactly where the time goes on your machine.

Install

Settings → Community plugins → Browse, search Cursor-Smith, install, enable. Needs Obsidian 1.13.7 or newer.

It activates as soon as it's on. Note editor only keeps the custom cursor to your notes, so search boxes, palettes and settings keep Obsidian's own caret.

Commands

All four are in the Command Palette and can take a hotkey.

Command	What it does
Toggle on/off	Switches the whole plugin off and back on without touching your settings.
Cycle preset	Loads the next saved preset. Bind it to a key and flip through your cursors.
Toggle CUA / Vim mode	Switches the settings panel between the normal cursor and the five Vim cursors, and flips Obsidian's Vim key bindings with it when you've let it.
Performance report	Measures ten seconds of normal typing and copies a short report to the clipboard. Paste it into an issue if Obsidian feels slower with the plugin on.

Settings

Built on Obsidian's own settings framework, so every option is indexed by the settings search: type "flicker" in the search box and it takes you straight to the row. Cards collapse, sub-options sit indented under the switch that reveals them, and turning a switch shows or hides its options in place without redrawing the panel.

Card	What it controls
Cursor-Smith	Enable, notes only, hide the real cursor, hide when Obsidian isn't focused, Low power mode, respect reduced motion, the CUA / Vim switch
Presets	Save, load, edit, delete, share
Appearance	Style, thickness, colors and gradients, opacity, translucency, rounded corners, letter-in-block
Blinking	Speed, balance, fade, delay, stop-after, breathing
Smooth movement	Glide, catch-up, delay, typing-adaptive boost
Effects	Everything the cursor does beyond sitting there

In Vim mode the Presets card gives way to Vim cursors, Vim presets and Per-mode cursors, with the same four look cards for whichever mode you're editing.

Building from source

The plugin is a TypeScript project: src/ holds the modules, npm run build bundles them into main.js with esbuild, npm run check type-checks, and npm test runs the test suite (1,100-odd assertions) against the built bundle. BUILDING.md has the layout. Releases are built by GitHub Actions from the tagged commit and carry build provenance attestations, so the main.js on a release is exactly what its source produces.

It pairs with Word-Smith

Word-Smith is my other plugin, a writing suite for Obsidian. Its themes can colour your caret per Vim mode, and its status bar can wear the same colour back.

Forged elsewhere

Cursor-Smith is MIT, and people have carried the engine to other editors. If you've ported it somewhere, open an issue and I'll add it here.

Editor	Port	By
Thymer	Cursor Tweaks	akaready

Questions, ideas, bugs

Found a bug, or have an idea for a new effect? Write it here.

Free and MIT. If it's made your writing better, a coffee helps me keep going. Cheers!