DECTCEM ?25 — Show/hide cursor

Byte forms

Every common string-literal form so you can paste-and-search either direction.

Description

DEC Text Cursor Enable Mode. \x1b[?25h shows the text cursor, \x1b[?25l hides it — the ? prefix marks this as a DEC private mode (not an ECMA-48 SGR or CSI sequence) and the trailing h / l is the SET / RESET final-byte pair shared by every DEC private mode (?7h/l DECAWM, ?12h/l cursor blink, ?1049h/l alt-screen, etc.). Honoured by every emulator in the support matrix above. The cursor's *position* is unaffected — only the rendered caret toggles — so hiding the cursor before a multi-line redraw and showing it afterward avoids the visual jitter of the caret skipping across redrawn text, which is the primary use case for progress bars and full-screen TUIs.

The single biggest pitfall — and probably the most common terminal-state bug — is leaving ?25l set when your program exits abnormally. A panic, a kill -9, a SIGINT before your handler runs, or an unhandled exception in a CLI flow leaves the user's shell with no visible prompt cursor. The user then has to run tput cnorm (the terminfo cap for ?25h) or reset to recover it. Always register a cleanup handler that re-shows the cursor: bash trap "printf '\\x1b[?25h'" EXIT INT TERM; Python signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, lambda *_: (sys.stdout.write('\\x1b[?25h'), sys.exit(130))); Go defer fmt.Print("\\x1b[?25h") paired with an os/signal handler that re-emits before exit. The stuck-cursor-hidden pitfall under /pitfalls documents the recovery path in detail. Visibility is also orthogonal to dec-cursor-shape (DECSCUSR \x1b[N q) and dec-cursor-blink — you can hide a steady block cursor and re-show it later as a blinking bar; the three settings compose independently.

Re-show the cursor with \x1b[?25h — the surgical complement of ?25l. Inside alt-screen mode (?1049h) the visibility setting is per-screen on most emulators: hiding the cursor in alt-screen does not propagate back to the primary buffer on exit, so an alt-screen TUI that hides the cursor doesn't strictly need to re-show it before the ?1049l exit (though belt-and-braces code emits both anyway). The terminfo caps for portability are civis (hide → \x1b[?25l on xterm-256color) and cnorm (show → \x1b[?25h); tput civis / tput cnorm in shell scripts is the canonical way to spell this without a hard $TERM assumption. Related: dec-cursor-shape for shape, dec-cursor-blink for blink, cursor-save-restore for snapshotting and restoring position alongside visibility.

Spec citation: xterm-ctlseqs (DECTCEM)

Examples

printf '\033[?25l'; sleep 2; printf '\033[?25h'

import sys; sys.stdout.write('\x1b[?25l')

fmt.Print("\x1b[?25l")

process.stdout.write('\x1b[?25l')

printf("\x1b[?25l");

Terminal support

xterm

yes

Linux console (fbcon)

yes

macOS Terminal.app

yes

iTerm2

yes

Windows Terminal

yes

cmd.exe / ConPTY

yes

kitty

yes

alacritty

yes

WezTerm

yes

Ghostty

yes

GNOME Terminal

yes

Konsole

yes

tmux

yes

GNU screen

yes

Related sequences

• DECSET 1049 — Alternate screen buffer
• CUU / CUD / CUF / CUB — Move cursor
• DECSC / DECRC — Save and restore cursor
• DECSCUSR — Cursor shape
• DECSET ?12 — Cursor blink

In the family cookbook

↗DEC cookbook · 1. The `?` prefix — DECSET vs SM