Not nearly as nasty as scroll hijacking so the page moves at a different speed than what I've instructed it to move at. Or pastejacking - when you're trying to copy a piece of text and the page makes you grab an entirely different string to what you'd highlighted and selected.
I like it how the author says how busy he is and how he finally snatched a few minutes out of this busy life to bring us this edict: don't hijack mouse pointers, or else!
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.
> For example, making it slightly tilted because it was easier to draw on old screens.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
I remember when the internet was wild, young and fun, and this was something people did all the time. If you’re building Salesforce or SAP or Microsoft Word you should avoid it, but if you’re making a fun and weird website you should go to town.
I use a very large mouse cursor because I hate when I have to search for the thing. Sometimes during meetings I get brain dead comments about it. I make it bigger in spite when I get a comment about it. Then in meetings they complain that they can't find their mouse pointer.... /rant
In general, customization is a net negative. There was a time when apps just used native OS controls for everything, and it was way better. Sure branding was lost, but that's not my problem. Most apps are generic, they should act like it.
I thought, how bad it could be? It's actually very annoying since it doesn't even follow your mouse acceleration profile, the fancy cursor just does its own thing. It's a minor inconvenience, but very jarring at first.
I encountered a few sites that can actually pull off "Hit ESC to enable video" even with ublock origin. I think they are using some sort of game controller api. Haven't encountered anything more infuriating in terms browsers and input device and haven't found a solution to it.
Codex's computer use was nice bc it didn't hijack your mouse. Idk why Claude thought it'd be a good idea to do computer-use that way. It's such bad UX, hoping Claude does something new/better we'll see
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 48.4 ms ] threadI can't see any difference between these in terms of UX - I got annoyed just looking at them.
What next, don't use blink or marquee elements?
Or else!
Standard issue cursors are not that great in all environments, sometimes making the cursor massively big or doing other daft things to it make sense. It is all about context and golden rules don't help.
No. Some older systems actually had straight pointers. The slightly tilted design is, I assume, a result of wanting to point to something while still being able to see what is to the immediate left of the pointer; useful for left-to-right text.
With this option placed it would just be another 'fun thing' you don't need to mind.
I select long text when I'm reading, I use it for focus and to keep track where I was if I need to switch to some other task in the middle.
In general, excessive customization is a net negative if it breaks expectations.
Absolutely change my cursor. But to something that looks cool, like a dragon or a sword. Not to a circle.
The mouse blob morphs into the background of any buttons you hover over, which is technically impressive but annoying in practice
from the other side of the coin, these are some of the ways it was/still is done.
example of browser element focus:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement...
allows you to throw the focus around,in the browser.
example of WinAPI SetFocus :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winuser/...
allows you to throw the focus around in the OS
JS example of mouse as a trigger event:
https://www.w3docs.com/learn-javascript/moving-the-mouse-mou...
JS example of manipulating the mouse:
https://shyama.com/automating-mouse-clicks-and-movements-wit...