Mouse Pointer as a Mere Mortal
22 points by zdw 3 days ago | 6 comments
mrob 17 minutes ago
Software moving the mouse cursor is only acceptable when the window is full-screen. If the user makes an application go full-screen, they are opting out of the normal desktop UI conventions. It's expected that full-screen software completely takes over the UI, and there are legitimate uses for moving the mouse cursor in full-screen software, e.g. centering an invisible cursor every frame in a first-person shooter game so endless view rotation is possible. But if it's windowed then it should be impossible.
replyLatencyKills 8 minutes ago
> But if it's windowed then it should be impossible.
replyI 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 the use case yet.”
whywhywhywhy 9 minutes ago
The effort put into making sure you know how to turn this feature on makes me question why it's so important to them, is the 3rd party paying them for this data?
replyEven 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.
There are a lot of interactions on a PC where user inputs land in the wrong place.
Claude Code and Codex in their various avatar allow us to type the next prompt while the aget 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.