The cursor color in neovim/vim is set by ghostty rather than the theme

[tmcw]

This is running with nvim --noplugin in ghostty:

And in iTerm2:

My ghostty configuration:

font-family = PragmataPro Mono
font-size = 16
theme = dark:catppuccin-frappe,light:ayu_light
macos-non-native-fullscreen = true
shell-integration-features = no-cursor
quick-terminal-position = right
quick-terminal-autohide = false
cursor-invert-fg-bg = false

keybind = cmd+s=new_split:down
keybind = cmd+d=new_split:right
keybind = cmd+shift+enter=toggle_visibility
keybind = global:cmd+shift+enter=toggle_quick_terminal

This means that we end up with low contrast while editing files:

I think that in iTerm2 my cursor color has been always defined by my neovim colorscheme, and ghostty is instead rendering a cursor with the same color regardless of colorscheme.

[rhodes-b]

And the cursor is orange for ghostty in the shell and black for iterm2 in the shell?

if you are running neovim with no plugins (colorschemes) I would think this is 100% the expected behavior as neovim is not overriding your cursor color

https://github.com/mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes/blob/master/ghostty/Builtin%20Tango%20Light#L19
there is a option you can add in your config to override the cursor color of your theme (or set one if you are not using a theme)

https://github.com/neovim/neovim/blob/f4ee0ab2f1a15fe3bb88122fa162620e4af74b1d/runtime/doc/options.txt#L3037
the default here says TermColor

[tmcw]

I was running with no plugins to try to make this reproducible but running with a color scheme has a themed cursor color in other terminals but the same orange across all themes in ghostty, which makes the cursor contrast illegible:

In ghostty with the oxocarbon theme:

In iTerm2 with the oxocarbon theme:

[rhodes-b]

This is kitty I have no neovim plugins
look how its using my cursor color and cursor text color because it did not override them inside of neovim

I also cannot reproduce this with oxocarbon

recording.mp4

[00-kat]

I'm not sure if Neovim does do this by default, I've had this behaviour in pretty much every terminal emulator.

[canova]

I have the same issue. I'm using "catppuccin-mocha" theme in both ghostty and neovim and this is how it looks:

Ghostty:

Alacritty:

I've also tested with kitty and iTerm with the same colorscheme applied, and they behave like Alacritty too. I can't read the character that the block cursor is on only when I'm on Ghostty.

On the other hand, I can read it when there is no theme applied to Ghostty:

[tmcw]

The other commenters, I think, are right - the vim colorscheme doesn't actually control the cursor color or color flipping, but the defaults for ghostty were just not working for me: after adding

cursor-invert-fg-bg = false
cursor-color = #222222
cursor-text = #ffffff

I have a usable setup, with contrast for the cursor!

[canova]

That worked for me as well. I just looked at the colors of my theme, catppuccin-mocha for alacritty and it says:

[colors.cursor]
text = "#1e1e2e"
cursor = "#f5e0dc"

I changed these colors to what alacritty has, and now I have a readable block cursor.

But the iTerm2-Color-Schemes repo (which ghostty uses) shows these values:

cursor-color = #f5e0dc
cursor-text = #cdd6f4

So it looks like a bug on the iTerm2-Color-Schemes repo to me.

[00-kat]

Oh yeah someone else noticed that the Catppuccins' cursor text colour were messed up in the iTerm2 Color Schemes copy too.

[canova]

I filed this bug there: mbadolato/iTerm2-Color-Schemes#547