Animated Cursors
tattoy.sh
tattoy.sh
It's an over-the-top animation of a terminal cursor moving from position to position, helps notice where it moved to. I thought it'll be something about mouse cursor animations. I could see myself using this if a) I was using more TUI apps and b) it'd be toned down quite a bit.
I wish more terminals implemented something similar.
Thanks!
This is so fucking cool. I'm going to add this right away.
> This is fixed in the next release, nothing to see here
or
> I think think one is actually a problem, see issue 1657
And then your coworkers could view the logs in some way (special terminal emulator? piped through some kind of filter? idk) and your annotations would appear in a column next to the logs, perhaps with some background coloring to indicate which annotation goes with which log message. This way you don't all duplicate the effort of deciding whether this particular error is worth worrying about--instead you'd leave notes right there on the error (anchored via context triggered piecewise hashes).
The tattoy protocol seems like it be a good way to apply the highlighting on the logs whenever one that has a matching annotation appears on screen (https://tattoy.sh/docs/plugins/).
> do any of my peers have annotations on any of this?
But I think the way to get there is to make a variety of purpose built apps which all follow the same pattern, and I figure annotations on logs is one of the first ones I'll do. It has been slow going though, holidays and weekends, so it'll be a while.
But, if you want a truly serious usecase, then my pipe dream is that Tattoy becomes the "XWayland" for an entirely new protocol for terminals that explores moving on from ANSI codes, the terminfo database and so on. I wrote a blog post about this idea: https://tattoy.sh/news/an-end-to-terminal-ansi-codes
Greatly helps when demoing something from my terminal and having multiple splits open.
However, when making large moves, it seems a bit disorienting and the gradient effect seems very subtle in the video. Perhaps make the effect depend on distance, like actual motion blur would?
I was also thinking about having a color shift when moving up vs moving down, not sure about that one but certainly something I'd play with.
Like all moderne UIs now have animations, ranging from very slow to barely fast enough for my personal perception.
And it becomes increasingly hard to disable those animations. They creep up absolutely everywhere. And they drive me crazy. I want my computer to act instantaneously. Redraw within 8ms.
Almost all animations are also impossible to abort or skip. Worse plenty will animate concurrently. So you might be jumping around on a webpage faster than the animation, which then jumps you back to then slowly animate.
My life on this planet is finite. A computer isstupidly fast. Why waste my precious lifetime? How many minute of life do developers of animations steal from people?
I do understand that I process visual stimulus faster than most people. Making me an outlier. Modern interfaces are devoided of identifiable buttons and all look like a smear of emptiness with a few dollops of text and burger icons to interact with. Making it hard to notice what changed between two actions. Maybe increasing the need for animations to help people follow
In any case, I suffer greatly with animations.
- airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,
- a sixel-based rendering of lens flares, or
- a fluid dynamics engine to simulate rippling of characters around the path along which the cursor moves
(Joke, looks very cool even though i'd probably find it too distracting)
I will take the light saber sounds.
With stereo-spacial transformation, so the sounds "direction" and "distance" match my own physical dynamic orientation relative to the cursor's motion on the screen.
And, the ability to open a small window, which gives me the cursor's visual point-of-view, as it zooms through the graphics on the screen.
Also, each traversed character should get "hot" as the curser goes over it, indicated with a stable glow for a quarter of a second, followed by an exponential fade over another second.
I think we can all agree that when in flow, functional distractions need to work harder, be more immersive, to be effective.
> I've never been asked to pair up eversince I've started using tattoy
I wasn't able to get this working. MacOS, homebrew, added [animated_cursor] to the tattoy.toml and the glsl file.
I'd very much appreciate a bug report. It looks like maybe Tattoy isn't connecting to the GPU on Mac: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/129
(they have other effects, check effects in neovide for better defaults)
Honestly, iterm2 is way too nice a piece of software considering the price. A real labor of love from a guy who apparently has lots more free time than me. :-)