Earlier quoted context omitted.
Powerful* text editors built on the web stack cannot rely on the OS text caret and have to provide their own. In this case, VSCode is probably using the most reasonable approach to blinking a cursor: a `step` timing-function with a CSS keyframe animation. This tells the browser to only change the opacity every 500ms. Meanwhile, Chrome hasn't yet optimised this completely yet, hence http://crbug.com/361587 . So curren…
>> text editors built on the web stack cannot rely on the OS text caret Can you explain in simple terms why this is the case? Why on earth not?
Well, because, in order to satisfy the most finicky of its users (myself included), VS Code offers no less than 6 styles for its cursor ('block', 'block-outline', 'line', 'line-thin', 'underline' and 'underline-thin') and 5 animations ('blink', 'smooth', 'phase', 'expand' and 'solid'). Also, in a future release the themes will be allowed to change the color of the cursor to any of the 16,581,375 colors in the RGB spectrum.
Does that answer your question? :)