In an idle QPlainTextEdit cursor blinks normally. When a user presses and holds down a key, a character is repeatedly inserted and the cursor does not blink - it is always on making it easy to spot the spot (haha) where the edit is happening. Inserting a character with insertPlainText however does not exhibit this behavior - the cursor blinks as if there was no edit taking place (same as in idle). It makes it easy to loose the notion of cursor position. Please see the attached example.