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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

Are you using one of "pointer" or "cursor" (which are synonyms, to me[1]) to refer to either an I-beam cursor, or the hand cursor, commonly used to indicate a clickable hyperlink?

(I actually dislike how text in native apps doesn't often permit the use of I-beam; it'd be a lot easier to copy/paste errors if one could highlight them.)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_(user_interface)#Pointe...

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In CSS, the hand cursor is called a 'pointer' cursor, so I think that's what was intended. For anyone who hasn't internalized this, including the app's users, I imagine this is quite confusing. :)

IIUC 'regular cursor' is just the default mouse cursor. I don't think anyone meant the I-beam/text cursor, but I agree with your selection comment entirely.

Yup. In css the attribute that controls the pointer is called 'cursor' these are two types are 'default' and 'pointer. [1]

In MacOS these are called pointers with 'arrow' and 'pointing hand' styles [2]

Not sure what Windows calls it but some googling shows them as 'standard select' and 'link select'.

[1]: http://www.javascripter.net/faq/stylesc.htm

[2]: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

There's more than two types of cursors, it's just that MacOS doesn't support anything but those two (excluding the directional cursors), and Windows supports most, and most GNU/Linux DEs support all.

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