This is with (emacs-version)
"GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601)
of 2011-03-10 on 3249CTO"
I suddenly noticed that the cursor is like a standard Windows caret, and the sort of editing I'm trying to do is making it hard for me to spot. I am digging for a way to make the cursor be a colored block (or outline block in inactive windows), the way it used to be in emacs 19, and coming up empty-handed.
Is there an incantation that will do this, or am I doomed to be disappointed?
ETA: this is emacs running natively on Windows, which I mistakenly thought would be evident from the emacs-version output. I am not interested in solutions involving cygwin, because that would not fit into my normal workflow.
Emacs will use the system caret if it detects that you are running some accessibility software on your PC. This is because such software does its job by tracking the system caret.
You can override this by setting w32-use-visible-system-caret to nil.