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Rendered at 20:36:57 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Saves you a bit of movement on large screens, but since it jumps it doesn’t lead the eyes which makes is disorienting.
But I have used mouse warping in other environments and I’ve never been caused disoriented. It never occurred to me that such a problem is possible. In general, it seems like this problem can be avoided by 1) moving the mouse only to changed states of the screen, 2) only if they’re small enough to be easily observable, and 3) only for repetitive tasks.
What happens when you enable "mouse pointer trails"? Or is that a feature that died like a decade or two after manufacturers stopped using the extremely slow LCDs that made use of the feature all but mandatory on machines that used them?
In requirements engineering, you do only codify things in the positive sense. The reason behind is that the system shall only do things that are described. If there are no things described, the system shall do nothing.
You can forbid a lot of things, but then you would have pages upon pages of requirements telling you things you may not even wanted implemented in the first place.
i thought that was genius, until i upgraded to vim-motif, which would instead move the popup to where your mouse cursor is
But yeah, it feels like somebody physically grabbing your hand and moving it.
I truly miss this level of detail in the outside world. It feels as if you’re resizing a window but the mouse pointer doesn’t move.
The Lightroom example is nowhere close to that. Looks like a thoughtless optimization.
Even major features in Adobe apps the furthest they go is those video popups rendered using webviews so they glitch into existence as a white box.
Letting the view follow the pointer (therefore moving it relative to the device screen) would be remarkable for this genre of UI.
This specific action -- taking the thing away from the user, while they're actively engaging with it -- should be punishable by sacrificing the designer to Satan straight up. A bit harsh but justified.
Basically there are neurons whose receptive field (ie the subset of the outside world that causes the neuron to fire) is "everything a monkey can reach". Flash a light in that area, that neuron fires, flash it beyond that area, neuron stays silent.
Now if you give the monkey a rake, the neuron's receptive field immediately grows to encompass the space it can now reach with the rake too: the rake becomes part of the body schema, not part of the outside world [2].
But if the rake instead is just a stick but it controls a mouse cursor on the screen, the _area of the screen_ the monkey can interact with with the cursor becomes part of the receptive field of that neuron too. That suggests that the cursor itself becomes part of the body schema.
TL;DR don't mess with people's mouse cursors, it's like cutting their limbs off.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15588812/ [2]: A wild Heidegger appears and talks about Vorhandensein and Zuhandensein.
“Don’t mess” is a very broad range that includes things like removing the mouse cursor at nine PM. Of course, no one should do that.
But a narrower conclusion “let the mouse warp at certain predictable cases” doesn’t contradict your thesis.
Aw that looks fun!
Turns out it’s handy. After switching apps the cursor is in a defined location and closer to anything I want to click.
It’s weird but it works for me.
DonHopkins on Nov 3, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: Evolution of the Scrollbar
Open Look scrollbars would be impossible to implement properly in the web browser without using the Pointer Lock API that let you "warp" the mouse cursor position, because when you click on the elevator or cable, the elevator cab actually pushes the cursor up and down with it.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Pointer_Loc...
Here's a demo of Open Look scrollbars from Brad Myers' "All The Widgets" video, which he produced for the ACM CHI 1990 conference. It also has demos of many other kinds of scrollbars and other widgets. (Sun Microsystems, Inc. OPEN LOOK, 1988):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw&t=12m57s
>All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990: This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0.
When I was working on The NeWS Toolkit at Sun (an Open Look toolkit implemented in PostScript), Jonathan Payne implemented the Open Look scrollbars, and I thought they had such a cool interesting 3D shape with their elevator, cable, anchors, ridges and arrows, that I carved an 3D Open Look scrollbar for him out of soap as a birthday gift. (He also implemented JOVE: Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs for Unix, and JED: Jot EDitor for TNT.)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_NeWS_Toolkit_scr...
Google Wave also had elevator-like scrollbars with arrows on the elevator, but since they were implemented in the web browser without the Pointer Lock API, they could not push the cursor like Open Look scrollbars, so they implemented a weird shadow and didn't move the elevator until you moved the mouse away, with was very confusing to users:
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
>Using Google’s scrollbars, it’s also possible to scroll by clicking, but since the arrows are attached to the thumb, that creates a bit of a problem. Typically, the thumb indicates the scroll position. But since you can’t move the thumb while the user is clicking on it, Google has introduced a second element, a «shadow» that is displayed below the thumb. This shadow indicates the current scroll position:
http://ignorethecode.net/upload/217/click_scroll_google.mp4
>If the user moves the mouse away, the thumb will eventually move to the shadow.
>I did not notice this until a commenter on Hacker News pointed it out. He also notes that the scrollbars seem to perform poorly with longer waves.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=944012
https://web.archive.org/web/20100308003557/http://www.comple...
>The Non-Standard Wave Scrollbar
>Figure 6-1. Unlike the scrollbar in your web browser, Wave's scrollbar is the same height no matter how long the list it's scrolling, which keeps the up and down arrows always the same short distance away.
>The scrollbar on the right side of Wave's panels works a bit differently than the scrollbar in your web browser. Like most scrollbars, you can drag it up and down to scroll, or click its up and down arrows to move it. Unlike most scrollbars, the Wave scrollbar's height doesn't change. It's always the same, small size, which puts its up and down arrows in close proximity to one another, as shown in Figure 6-1. Google's intention is to benefit people accessing Wave on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area, but it has thrown off some preview users.[2] Google explains "the deal" with the scrollbar in Wave's Help section:[3]
>You might find that the scrollbar in Google Wave behaves a little differently from scrollbars in other Google products. To use it, you can drag the bar or you can use the arrows on either end of it—clicking the arrows without moving your mouse allows you to very quickly scroll up and down the page.
>Even at this early stage, at least one developer has created a Google Chrome extension that reverts Wave's custom scrollbars to Chrome's native scrollbars.
Google Wave: Scrolling. How to use the scrollbars in Google Wave.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxt2LXCSw5Q
A Pissed Off Tutorial For Google Wave
There are a lot of interactions on a PC where user inputs land in the wrong place.
Claude Code and Codex in their various avatars allow us to type the next prompt while the agent is still working and responding on the earlier one. But this constantly runs into a permission prompt from running session -- either interrupting or worse entering a response to the permission prompt unintentionally.
Even during normal prompting slash commands interfere annoyingly with normal use of the slash key (i use a slash to indicate a list of two or more choices sometimes when i write).
Permission popups and confirmation dialogs that appear unexpectedly and swallow our keystrokes, spacebar and enter key hits mid sentence have always annoyed me.
Laggy devices, and resource hungry sluggish UIs compound this problem.
> as a matter of fact, there is something really interesting about a mouse pointer feeling less like a deity floating above it all, and more like a regular in-game actor.
My counter-counter argument would be a general principle for UX designers: Are you designing a game or a tool? If you're designing a tool, don't put cutscenes in your software.
I think games are special, because their explicit purpose is to deliver an experience and often also tell a story. Within that context, I'm fine with having control restricted or yanked away if it's in service of something meaningful in the game.
The same is not true for tools (even in-game tools actually), where I want to complete some kind of task in the most efficient way possible - and often only I know the context of that task.
Unfortunately, that stuff has already seeped into UX design in a lot of forms, in particular as random "new feature" popups that usually appear at the worst possible moment and cannot be shown again. In situations like this, I'd value predictability much more than the coolness factor of a game-like UI.
This doesn’t account for cases where the system is semi-automatic, such as a tiling window manager (you don’t set all the dimensions manually). If the automatic part is to stay at all, it should make certain assumptions for the user.
If there's really a case where you need to see the exact position of the cursor while it's off-screen, you could display it wrapped around only while it's actually off-screen. But this would potentially confuse new users, so it should be optional and disabled by default.
Disagreed. Seeing the cursor at all times gives you some point of reference, and once you release the tool, you know where your cursor is.
> If there's really a case where you need to see the exact position of the cursor while it's off-screen, you could display it wrapped around only while it's actually off-screen.
I don’t understand what this means. If it’s not off-screen then it’s automatically also not wrapped around.
> But this would potentially confuse new users, so it should be optional and disabled by default.
This presumes that “cursor is suddenly allowed to be off-screen and not visible” is less confusing.
Seeing is an inferior means of knowing where the cursor is compared to intuition. When I move the cursor, I know where it is with no conscious effort because I treat it as part of my hand. I disable mouse acceleration to make this easier. I don't need to look at my hand to know where my hand it. My subjective experience of mouse clicking is the same: I look at the target and the mouse cursor automatically appears there. If you allow software to move the mouse cursor you weaken this intuition.
>I don’t understand what this means. If it’s not off-screen then it’s automatically also not wrapped around.
When the cursor moves off-screen, it could be displayed with position modulus the screen width/height. Additionally, the cursor shape could be changed to make it obvious it's not the true position. This might make sense if you really need to know the exact off-screen position and the GUI control you're manipulating doesn't provide sufficiently precise feedback.
>This presumes that “cursor is suddenly allowed to be off-screen and not visible” is less confusing.
It is less confusing because other than extending the range of the mouse off-screen, the mouse behavior doesn't change. As soon as the off-screen action finishes, the mouse cursor snaps back to the position it would have otherwise been in.
An alternative option would be to snap back to the position it was where the special off-screen mode was initiated. This might actually be better, because it makes the off-screen mousing mode an extension of moving the mouse while it's lifted off the mouse pad, which users already have intuition for.
Realize it consciously or not, visual feedback is a critical part of this loop.
> As soon as the off-screen action finishes, the mouse cursor snaps back to the position it would have otherwise been in.
The cursor jumping to the edge of the screen, which is not somewhere the user ever saw it and may be outside of the application, seems worse than any current issue while still being insufficient for most legitimate use-cases.
I don't really see any fake cursor approach that isn't going to behave awkwardly in practice - e.g: is it your real (invisible?) cursor or fake cursor that can click to focus another application, and what happens to your cursors when you do so?
Just letting the user deny mouse control for an app (like on Wayland) seems sufficient to solve your annoyance. Maybe adding a separate permission for control while unfocused, since that's rarer. No need to break all windowed applications with reason to capture/move the mouse.
Well designed video games that rely on fast and precise mouse input capture the cursor during the gameplay until menu is shown.
The only times I have to go fullscreen is for the games that fail to capture the cursor and where accidentally clicking outside of the game window leads to a loss.
Can't imagine a non-game program other than a video player that I would want fullscreen.
I have one monitor, so fairly often have games/editors windowed with something else alongside them (a video, documentation, …). There are also uses where the mouse is only captured temporarily - like FPS-controls flying mode in Godot and Blender. Some image editors also allow for things like moving the cursor with arrow keys, which I find useful.
I worked on several apps for the visually impaired that automatically move the mouse cursor to different UI elements in the front-most application, regardless of the window state. It’s a good reminder that “impossible” often just means “I haven’t accounted for that use case yet.”
But why shouldn’t the global UI itself make use of mouse warping?
That is quite a different statement from "It should be impossible." What should be impossible is for the OS to prevent this type of usage when it is clearly useful. Beyond accessibility, I use these features to automate testing of native macOS GUI apps.