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Comment by LeoPanthera | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me of how in Windows 95, installers would complete quicker if you constantly moved the mouse, but would take longer if it was still.

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I discovered a bug in a microsoft software installer where it would hang unless you moved the mouse over the progress bar.

Discovered this when trying to use a java api to make silent installers for programs that didn't have them.

The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back and forth over the progress bar.

>The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back and forth over the progress bar.

And I thought browsers highjacking the scrollbar was bad!

Ha nah, the whole goal was unattended installs. Nobody felt hijacked except me for wasting so much time.

> The solution was to use the java api to move the mouse back and forth over the progress bar.

Oh the memories of playing with java.awt.Robot...

Nailed it.

Currently use AutoIT and InnoSetup for installation wrappers those that don't have installers with silent support or have the ability to automate the settings. This is where BSD and Linux shine compared to Windows! Scripting and automation is built-in with the ladders and greatly lacking in the former.

It's an awkward latter to climb indeed.

The opposite happens in CMD on Windows, at least in the past.

Applications that wrote a lot to the logscreen were slowed down by it. While writing to stdout is buffered, it seems that the rendering itself runs in the same thread as the application.

Making a selection freezes the terminal and this stops the rendering, allowing the application to run much faster.

Removing the selection (by pressing escape) rerendered the window (and the buffer), and it went back to its original slowness.

Back in the day making a selection would actually freeze the process in some cases.

To this day I still attempt never to click inside a running cmd / powershell console. Too many times script execution has been halted by this. It is probably something that has been fixed long time ago but I am still a bit paranoid about it.

It isn't a bug, you could actually toggle this behavior. Don't know how the option was called and cannot find it in Windows 11. But it certainly was still there in the latest Win10 build.

I think it was called something like quick edit or similar.

Still does in CMD.exe

I guess it is intentional, otherwise you couldn't select and copy stuff at all

There is even an option to change the behavior so that the window doesn't freeze if you select anything. Batches freeze completely when you clicked anywhere and I found out the hard way.

Probably some feature that John requested because he couldn't read some output quickly enough. I don't understand how this can be the default behavior.

i always thought freezing the terminal causes a pause of the app as well, is it just the rendering?

I seem to recall this causing buffer overruns/bad CD-Rs if you did this with the old 1x/2x CD burners.

I KNEW IT. SWEET VINDICATION.

155 points - 25.May.2009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=625957

493 points 4.Jan.2014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7011228

Still happens for Disk Cleanup, in a way. It can get stuck at parts, and it might finish but the window doesn't go away until you hover the mouse above it.

Observed the same, it's very annoying. I start a script to image the VM (which among others does disk cleanup before finally handing over to sysprep)... and sometimes I find the unattended VM hours later still waiting for me to move the mouse over the window.

I had an issue like this once installing windows 2000. If you didn’t move the mouse during the installation, it would hang and fail. Finally got it to install by sitting there moving the mouse.

Wow, I had that exact same issue before.

I wonder what the cause is/was.

I'm aware that old PS/2 connectors would interrupt, vs being polled like USB.

USB only polls at the USB protocol level - it signals activity to the host with interrupts like a normal person^W device.

sounds like a job for a usb mouse-jiggler

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