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Comment by arriu | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe these actually used to be popular but they were. I wonder if their over-the-top nature made learning how to use a computer mouse a little more fun.

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Trails were an accessibility feature in early GUI environments (based on accident of early GUI renderers; even Windows 3.1 used to make trails "naturally" on an over-taxed machine when repaints were taking too long), but I think most of the uses of them, especially in the early days of the web a lot of it was just "personality". That OG Geocities feel of finding a bunch of interesting JS snippets, copy and pasting, and maybe lightly tweaking the ones that spoke to you and seem like the coolest thing to add to your fan page for your current favorite cartoon or local roller coaster.

Not to mention that early laptops had LCDs with very slow refresh rates, which could make a moving pointer very difficult to track. The trail gave an indication of where the pointer had been and was going as it was traveling.

> Trails were an accessibility feature in early GUI environments

I’m pretty sure the option still exists on Windows 11

Yes, but it got removed from overt Accessibility Features at some point Vista-ish and is hidden as an "additional option" that's three or four clicks away from "Ease of Access".

I still leave the mouse trails on and long --- definitely helps on a huge screen with many colourful windows.

I always use trails, along with the largest pointer I can set and inverted coloration. It makes it a lot easier for me to always find the mouse at a glance when I move it slightly. I didn't always do so in the past, but the move to 4k clinched it.

Windows has a bug(?) with inverted colors combined with trails, though, where sometimes the cursor double-inverts when it's at rest. I consider this sort of a feature, though, since I don't care where it is if I'm not actively using it.

On Mac if you wiggle the cursor around it'll become giant for a second to show you where it is. Occasionally comes in handy

I love the inverted colors, it really helps keep the cursor visible in the bleak wasteland of Windows 10's UI.

I miss webpages with googly eyes that would follow your mouse on the screen. What a sense of whimsy.

If you are on Linux, just run xeyes. Classic. :)

xeyes was another wayland casualty sadly. I hope someone figures out a way to build wayland_eyes

For security reasons that's outside the scope of the core protocol. But don't worry, all it would take is for someone to develop an eye-following protocol and for the compositors to implement it.

It really is better, folks. Daniel Stone talk!

Already developed. https://blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2012/03/14/looking-around-wayla...

And don't forgot Xeyes

And like Solitaire's "it's a tool to teach mouse use", I always thought the "it's a utility to track the mouse, not just a bit of whimsy" was a bit of retconing, but I have no real proof.

I believe Imguror had something like that for their 404 page with some animals following the cursor with their eyes. Always enjoyed that.

Didn't GitHub do that too? I seem to remember a framed picture of a giraffe in a top hat (imgur) and an octopus cat in the Tattooine desert (GitHub).

Ghost was possible on the desktop as well, IIRC. I wonder if it was intended as an accessibility feature or for new users who had trouble keeping track of the mouse.

Yup. I am glad we've moved on, at least on windows, to double-tapping left ctrl to highlight the cursor. It's a pleasant effect.

macOS's shake-the-mouse gesture isn't as nice. It's such a "violent" gesture that it feels like it will just reinforce the feeling of frustration for users.

Note that left ctrl trick is still just a PowerToy in Windows. That's one I'm surprised hasn't graduated to in box given its general usefulness for accessibility and overall simplicity.

Oh dang. Thanks, I didn't realize that.

Exploring mouse options for something else and stumbled upon a reminder there is an in box feature for it. It's off-by-default and the changes that Power Tool makes are: switch from single Left Ctrl to double Left Ctrl, and switches from classic Windows "wave of rings" visual (it expands a bunch of rings out from the pointer as a very simple animation) to the "Spotlight" mechanic that dims the screen except for a circle around the pointer.

It's built into "Mouse Properties" in the standard settings dialog on this Win11 box.

macOS's is discoverable by the very action one might take trying to find the cursor even without knowing about it, while Windows' isn't. Source: I found the macOS one by accident, but didn't know about the Windows double-tap-ctrl thing until reading your post. Most likely I'll forget the ctrl trick by tomorrow, but shake-the-mouse was stuck in my brain the instant I found it.

Or maybe it's useful for when you do get frustrated and can't find the mouse cursor :)

I don't really like the idea of double-tapping control either, for much the same reason, but wiggling the mouse seems gentler. I still use trails, though; I'll take all the help I can get.

I used to wonder the same then one day I tried LSD[0], and it was another illumination. By then, I'm sure the origin of the cursor trail was some trippy programmer trying to recreate the same effect he saw "under the influence".

[0]: I swear, just once!

A different form of cursor ghosting would occur when certain GUI programs got stuck. So it might just be that somebody saw that and thought it was neat.

A Ghost/Trailing effect is still available on Windows under Accessibility.

It's not the users that were learning, it was the (amateur) designers. (See also: the 80s DTP revolution).

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