mode indicator in terminals

[spiderbit]

When I start emacsclient in from a terminal tty/ssh, the cursor doesn't change between a line and a block depending if I am in command-mode or insert-mode, that makes it very hard to see in which Mode you are you only see the I or C in the left bottom corner.

Can that be somehow fixed (some .Xresources line, or other terminal emulator) or could there be some other indicator be used like changing the color of the cursor as example?

(set-cursor-color) also doesn't change the color in the console, so that workaround would also not work.

[wi11dey]

Afaik emacs uses the tty's native cursor to display the cursor, so it would be difficult to implement this.
Some terminals may have an escape code they recognize to change the cursor shape or color, but we would probably need to collect a list of these and add it to Emacs itself, so setting cursor-type will do the right thing on ttys

[ghost]

This is how I did it for 'xterm', just adapt to whatever
terminal emulator you use.

(defun my/xterm-cursor ()
  "Change the cursor shape in xterm to match the GUI (xah-fly-keys)."
  (unless (display-graphic-p)
    (if xah-fly-insert-state-q
        (send-string-to-terminal "\033[6 q") ; Vertical bar
      (send-string-to-terminal "\033[2 q")))) ; Box
(add-hook 'xah-fly-command-mode-activate-hook #'my/xterm-cursor)
(add-hook 'xah-fly-insert-mode-activate-hook #'my/xterm-cursor)

[spiderbit]

Would that be hard to add that to xah-fly-keys or has any disadvantages?

[ghost]

Terminal emulator's use different ones and IDK anyway to find what terminal you
are in from inside GNU Emacs.