evil-mode has led my cursor to the dark side!

Mon Jul 16 04:12:22 CEST 2012

Hi,

evil-mode is so evil that it has stained my cursor black, as black as
the soul of evil-mode!

I upgraded to Emacs 24.1 from 23.4, and I noticed a new Themes feature,
so I set up the "tsdh-dark" theme, only to find that my cursor is now
black, even though the background color is a dark gray. At first I
thought some of my old customizations might have been conflicting with
the theming, but after cleaning up my ~/.emacs as follows, I found the
cursor remained black.

    ; specify packages for el-get
    (setq my-packages
          '(column-marker
            cython-mode
            evil
            evil-surround
            haskell-mode
            python-mode
            undo-tree))

    (setq evil-want-C-u-scroll t)
    ; load el-get
    (add-to-list 'load-path "~/.emacs.d/el-get/el-get")
    (unless (require 'el-get nil t)
      (with-current-buffer
          (url-retrieve-synchronously
           "https://raw.github.com/dimitri/el-get/master/el-get-install.el")
        (end-of-buffer)
        (eval-print-last-sexp)))
    (el-get 'sync my-packages)

    ; evil settings
    (evil-mode 1)
    (define-key evil-normal-state-map ",l" 'whitespace-mode)

    ; column markers
    (add-hook 'python-mode-hook '(lambda () (interactive) (column-marker-1 73) (column-marker-2 80)))
    (add-hook 'rst-mode-hook '(lambda () (interactive) (column-marker-1 73)))

    ; load Japanese input
    (require 'mozc)
    (setq default-input-method "japanese-mozc")

    ; setup smtpmail
    ; [redacted]

    ; start daemon
    (server-start)

    (custom-set-variables
     ;; custom-set-variables was added by Custom.
     ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
     ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
     ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
     '(custom-enabled-themes (quote (tsdh-dark)))
     '(evil-want-C-u-scroll t)
     '(file-precious-flag t)
     '(indent-tabs-mode nil))
    (custom-set-faces
     ;; custom-set-faces was added by Custom.
     ;; If you edit it by hand, you could mess it up, so be careful.
     ;; Your init file should contain only one such instance.
     ;; If there is more than one, they won't work right.
     '(default ((t (:width semi-condensed)))))

Then I suspected that the theme was just badly designed. But on a hunch,
I tried commenting out the line "(evil-mode 1)", and restarted
Emacs. The cursor was white! And running "M-x evil-mode" made it black
again.

How can I fix this? Is it a bug in evil-mode, or am I just doing
something wrong?

-Keshav