Comment 17 for bug 1520377

As for cursor disappearing in zsh: That's purely vte's business, it would be great to see steps to reproduce. We're not aware of any cursor-related bugs in the most recent vte versions.

As for xvkbd: I'm not aware of that tool but it sounds somewhat similar to xdotool. See the discussion at https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12926 (also following the stackoverflow link from there).