Advanced After Effects Cursor Blinker

[Stephen Dixon]

You could do this with text animators to give yourself the flexibility of keyframes, but what you need to do with that expression is change the substr() on the last line.

Substr takes a string (a collection of characters, like a word or a line of text) and chops it up according to its two parameters, which give you the first character (in this case 0, because we start counting at 0) and the length T, which is incremented to give you the typing effect. Then the flashing cursor is added at the end.

We can modify that by making the substr expression only give 1 character, we do that by setting the second parameter (length) to 1, and use the incrementing T value for the start character. This will progressively give us each letter of the input string.

We also want to precede that by as many asterisks as letters, minus one. There is a built-in javascript function repeat() that takes a character or string and, well, repeats it. So if we write “*”.repeat(T-1) that will give us an incrementing line of asterisks. The only problem is that at the start T-1 will be negative, which will cause an error, so we need to complicate it a bit. Using the Math.max() function, which returns the maximum of two values, we can make sure it never goes below 0, thus: “*”.repeat(Math.max(T-1, 0)) when T < 0 the Math.max expression will return 0.

Putting it all together

Speed = 10; // typing speed
Blink = 2; // Speed of blinking cursor
CursorType = “|” // cursor type. Usually it is a vertical line “|” or Underscore symbol ‘_’
F = Math.round(time*Blink % 1);
L = text.sourceText.length;
T = (time – thisLayer.inPoint)*Speed;
if(F ==1 | (T<L & T>0) ){Fl=CursorType;}else{Fl=””;}
"*".repeat(Math.max(T-1,0)) + substr(T,1) + Fl

[Nitin Burli]

Hi Stephen,

I appreciate the time you’ve taken to explain the expression. Although, when I use the expression itself, it doesn’t work. I’m using the latest version of AE. Could there be something that I’m not doing right?