It's a bit scary to see that one of the highest-voted answers to this question (188 points) is completely wrong. It says that the (0,0) hotspot simplified the calculations for a cursor position update, because you didn't have to add any (X,Y) offset.
The problem with this idea is that the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh, there were many others including the text I-beam and a couple of kinds of crosshairs. And you could define any cursor of your own by providing a bitmap and transparency mask and the hotspot position.
You can see some of these cursors in the original Inside Macintosh Volume I and also in previous works from PARC.
Page 50 of the PDF (page I-38 of the document) shows some sample cursors.
Page 158 of the PDF (page I-146 of the document) has the pixel detail and hotspot locations for several cursors.
Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).
Can anyone explain why? I think I used to know, but it has long since escaped my memory and I would appreciate a refresher.
This page also has the definition of the Cursor structure:
TYPE Bits16 = Array[0..15] OF INTEGER;
Cursor = RECORD
data: Bits16; {cursor image}
mask: Bits16; {cursor mask}
hotSpot: Point; {point aligned with mouse}
END;
Point is defined on page I-139 and is more or less what you would expect, a pair of vertical and horizontal coordinates.
To be clear, the scary part is not that someone came up with the idea that (0,0) saved a few instructions. In fact, the notion came up elsewhere in this HN discussion. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, until you realize that there are many cursor shapes that require different hotspots.
The scary part is that 188 people upvoted this answer!
It's only scary at the beginning. Then you get used to it. Every single social media site - including HN - has uninformed people agreeing that a correct-sounding answer must be right. My friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work. My wife the linguist gets downvotes for explaining no that's not how language works. It's not scary - it's typical.
The linked SO page is a page of complete speculation.
History isn't just a bunch of logical thought exercises, it's an assembling of documentation and evidence.
As far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous documentation claiming intentionality so the question remains unanswered.
A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that cursor style in particular. I'd even accept a more minor source like Acorn, Digital Research, Quarterdeck, NeWS, VisiOn or MIT Athena (X).
Finding something that talks about say, lightpens and then defends the mouse cursor style in that way is working backwards from a hypothesis. It's weak and doesn't preclude other possibilities. Let's be rigorous and get it right.
The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in another ten years and again and then you’ll die as “that weird cursor offset obsessed fanatic”.
> The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).
> Can anyone explain why?
My assumption (not having an old Mac or documentation to confirm it...) is that the tip of the cursor had to be at (1, 1) to allow for a pixel's worth of mask around the outer edge of the tip.
>the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh
the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor styles had settled down to some standards.
in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk selections also does not require accurate placement, although I think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.
early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.
As I understand it the cursor angles are mostly a function of cursors originally being pixel art. In pixel art you need nice integer ratios to your angles or the line starts looking wobbly.
If you then design your cursor to be nice and pointy so it doesn't obscure the thing you're trying to click too much you end up with two angles where if you bisect them you're no longer at an integer ratio angle. So some fudging for the cursor tail is required.
Of course these days cursors are generally high resolution vector art, so none of the integer ratio angle concerns apply, but I assume most vector cursors originally got traced from their pixel predecessors.
This is all from memory and I was quite young back when any of this was relevant, so caveat emptor.
> Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).
Perhaps it's because cursors have a one pixel wide black border around them to enhance contrast, but users associate the cursor's position with the first bit of white (or color) at the tip. (0,0) is colored black for a typical cursor.
I think you touched on a wider problem. Peoples shallow understanding of the world, translates to a shallow world view and policies. It's kind of scary to me how much my high school sociology class, group projects, became political policy decades later. Simplistic reductions, when in real life even unclogging a toilet can have complictated steps, nuanced decisions, and many caveats.
It drives me up the wall! Permit me a digression: so much has been written about the early FPS era, but discussions of rocket jumping often skip straight to Quake and omit Rise of the Triad, despite rocket jumping being necessary to complete the game! ROTT's shareware release was the same day as Marathon, another game that does come up in these discussions.
Without reading everything there is on the subject, I'd guess it's tilted for the same reason it's tilted to the left.
Humans are tool makers and tool users. After enough time the tool becomes an extension of the body, even if the tip of the tool is mechanically or virtually detached from the hand that is controlling it. The tool maker designed this as a right-handed tool, coming into the frame in the right hand.
If the reason for the tilt direction was not this, then there would be no reason why it shouldn't tilt the other way. If you're right handed, try a right-leading cursor . It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks like a tool held in the left hand.
Does this have an effect on left-handed people? Perhaps. I'm left handed and it always felt wrong to use the mouse in my left hand. Is it because of the direction of the tilt? Who knows!
I'm left handed and have always used the mouse with my left hand.
The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange to me in any way.
I've been using computer mice in one way or another for more than 30 years and perhaps a lack of oddness comes from having so very much gotten used to it. Maybe newer left-handed mouse users would find the cursor tilt strange?
What matters is the hand you use your mouse with, I'm left handed for writing and most things but use the right hand for the mouse and it doesn't feel strange.
Also nobody is asking why it's pointed up, but it's the same reason. Your hand is usually below your eye-level.
From a theoretical point of view, the most intuitive cursor would be a crosshair, but I've tried that and don't like it.
> It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks like a tool held in the left hand.
It feels foreign only for a little bit. I'm right-handed but started developing RSI in my right wrist from using the mouse with that hand, so I've been using my left hand for over a decade now and no issues. The brain is very adaptable. For instance, we very quickly adapt to seeing the world upside down:
A horizontally flipped (straight edge on the right) cursor does exist, I think some versions of Microsoft Word use it when editing the left margin of a document or something like this. I don't think it's a standard Windows cursor though.
Dear OS makers: Please make it easier to swap the mouse buttons and also flip the cursor at the same time.
I say this because I use multiple computers and depending on when and where I am using them, sometimes want the mouse on the left. In addition to it "feeling wrong" to use a right handed cursor with my left hand (I swear it physically gives me cramps), having the cursor not match the buttons is super frustrating.
Once I got used to the direction of the cursor indicating the button configuration, it comes pretty naturally to click appropriately, even on occasions where I am using the mouse with the 'wrong' hand (because I'm using the other hand to pet a cat or drink my coffee or something).
On Windows 10/11, it's relatively easy to swap the buttons, but then I have to go into another, much more deeply buried menu (the old control panel that they seem to want to bury but can't get rid of because the Windows settings team is apparently too incompetent to put all the stuff you really need in the new configuration screens) to change the cursor to match. So then there's 5 seconds or so where the cursor doesn't match the button configuration during which my bones want to jump out of my wrist and then I need to go take a break. And for some reason, Windows 10 on my work computer seems to remember the button configuration but forget the cursor setting between reboots, so there's always a minute of confustion, there.
Also, if you're going to write some program with a cursor, DON'T OVERRIDE THE OS CURSOR WITH SOME {RIGHT|LEFT}-HANDED THING! I'm looking at dumb Acrobat Reader. The arrow in that program always points to the left even if I've flipped things in Windows, and then I get all confused when I try to click on the menus as if the mouse is in its right-handed configuration when it actually isn't.
I seem to recall some Linux distro that I used once upon a time getting this right, where there was an option to flip the cursor and the buttons at the same time. But I haven't seen that for a while.
Relatedly, why can't I have multiple cursors? There have been times when it would have been convenient to have a mouse plugged in on the left and the right and just have them both show up on the screen (pointing to the right and left, respectively, of course, with button configuration to match) so I could easily switch to whichever was more convenient at the time. Or for when $handedness-handed coworker wants to drive (just use the cursor that you normally would!). Best I found was some AutoHotKey script that didn't do quite what I wanted. Why does the OS layer need to assume exactly one cursor? Dumb if you ask me.
None of the Stack Overflow answers mention Alan Kay, who created the angled mouse cursor at PARC. When asked about this¹, he responded:
"The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with other things there, I designed and made many of the initial bitmap fonts). Then it stuck, as so many things in computing do."
It runs through the history of mouse cursors, as well as problems with some of the standard ones, and shows, among other things, historical cursors which were straight and not tilted.
It is one of those amazing videos that make the internet worthwhile, is short, and is by the author of Posy's Cursor Pack, http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
I'm not sure this is accurate. He shows the IIGS cursor as the Lisa "Color mode" cursor, for one thing.
He never mentions the NeXT environment, DPS and differences in DPI, their own black and white arrow cursor, and how that cursor actually came into Mac OS X, not the one from System 1 and onward.
The web page which that image is sourced from[0] and the reddit page it is in turn sourced from[1] makes a lot of hand-wavey analogies to optical balancing (which is a real phenomenon[2]) but doesn't make any compelling arguments for why they apply in this specific case.
An alternative explanation is that this intentional imperfection exists to match the unavoidable imperfection which occurred when the cursor graphic was originally drawn as tiny low resolution 1-bit pixel art. It looks correct because we're used to it being slightly wrong. And when viewed at a normal size, the difference is barely perceptible anyway.
The current high-resolution cursor seems like a scaled-up version of the original cursor. Perhaps it's that way for compatibility reason since there are tons of monitors using 100% scaling.
a recurring peeve of mine is small tooltips becoming unreadable underneath the cursor which blocks them from being read... then you move the cursor away the tooltip disappears from view... this could actually be fixed at some point in the future
Because Windows is made with poor attention to details and in a tasteless manner. For instance, when Windows XP came out, I remember clearly how some stock icons weren't properly aligned on the same baseline (it was corrected in some later SP).
I'd like to add to all of the reasons I find valid (not obscuring what one is pointing at, mimicking pointing with a finger) that everything displayed on the screen is pretty much perpendicular to the x or y axis. The tilted cursor thus sticks out among the rest of the content.
As an aside, as a typical Amiga quirk, the early Amiga mouse cursor was tilted in a 45° angle to the x axis, contrary to all the other popular GUIs with more acute angles for the cursor. And there was a built-in tool for creating custom mouse cursors, which I personally loved. See for example http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga12.html
I'd think that the original Amiga arrow pointer could have got its stubby style because hardware sprite could only be in low resolution and 2:1-stepped lines did not look very good.
The style was changed to a sharper point in Amiga OS 2.0 but it was still slanted 45°. First on the Amiga 1200/4000 with AGA could you get a high-resolution mouse pointer.
Similar to the Macintosh mouse pointer the click point was not at (0,0) but at (1,1) (the orange point in the skin colored area in the editor on the linked page).
One compelling reason is so that when pointing at something with the cursor, it doesn't block the thing you're pointing at. If the cursor was mirrored or even centered, hovering over a button would obscure some of the button. This assumes you approach from the bottom right though, which may be in turn because of the cursor's shape-- but I think reading direction is a stronger theory for why you'd want to approach from the bottom right.
This was my first reaction as well, but checking how I actually use a mouse I don't think it makes sense. Curious if it's jut me though.
For starters for normal desktop usage like >95% of the time the thing I want to click on isn't under the mouse yet so it doesn't obscure anything. Instead I move the mouse to it and by the time the mouse is there I don't care what is under it anymore because the decision to click it was made already.
Second when the mouse is over something I need to be able to read it seems I tend to move the mouse away (even when it's over text and turns into a straight cursor). The reason being that no matter what cursor is used its lines are typically wider and higher than the lines in rendered characters underneath so always obscures something. In other words: even if the cursor weren't tilted it would still obscure the same amount of surface, but just in a slightly different location. And that's really only slightly so for practical use won't matter.
Wrt where something is approached from: that depends on where the cursr is and where the target is. It would be really interesting to put this in a heatmap from daily usage, but I quickly checked some of the things I access often, like in my bottom taskbar and browser tab bar at the top, and since the things clicked often are both left and right of the screen and my cursor can be seeminlgy anywhere there might still be one approach direction used more but only by some marging.
Lastly most software I checked where obsucring could actually matter (e.g. CAD) uses custom cursors like 1 pixel wide crosses etc, not something tilted.
Thanks for the link! As a fountain pen addict, I found the video captivating. I was curious, though, as to why the person was printing, not writing. Sad.
Xerox parc again. I have the feeling everything we have today was invented in this place. How was it possible that it was so successful and influencial?
The point of a pointer is that it should stand off against the things it points at.
A usual GUI for the most part has straight edges and certain symmetries. A cursor that is similarly symmetric will blend in more easily, and get visually lost.
Which way it tilts is secondary, the irregularity of the tilt itself against the rest of the interface is key.
I don't know if it's me getting old or new HDR/5120 res/monitors with crazy white/black levels but I had to recently change my cursor color from white to green because I started losing it on all white screens.
Xerox Park and display reasons aside, I think that the 2nd answer, with the picture of the hand is the best answer apart from historical and technical reasons.
For unrelated reasons it got me thinking of Mark Zuckerberg telling Joe Rogan how they left only the hand (and not the whole arm) in their VR, as it was enough.
My understanding is that before mouse pointer there was a light pen aka light gun pointer. It was used perpendicularly to the screen, literally pointing at the desired location.
Then, when implementing a more 'remote' on-screen pointer, the notion of pointing perpendicularly at the site was best projected by a tilted 2D marker.
Think of the mouse pointer kinda sticking out of the screen as a dart.
I can't imagine the arm strain the users of the light pen had to endure back in time ... Though the workflow was probably still more keyboard-bound.
I have no idea, but a wild guess is that with old hardware the "hot" pixel that could trigger the collision interrupt was fixed to the upper left corner of
the hardware sprite.
EDIT: Another thought that crossed my mind is that with very lo-res screens a corner is the only way to get a well defined and sharp (yet fairly wide) arrowhead. The trade-off would be the shaft being pixelated, but the tip is more important.
I agree with all the reasons mentioned ranging from calculating the vertex position - sharp tip of the arrow (x, y) to the pixel issue (low resolution on older machines) to the right-hand pointing direction.
For all practical purposes, I observed 2 other things.
The first is that English is written left to write. If you ever had the experience of using a different language that starts from right to left, this same arrow feels weird.
And the second is a little activity experience.
1. Arrange the 4 files in a square box, 2 up 2 down
2. Notice that as soon as the sharp point of the arrow touches any file boundary, the arrow can select the file by a pixel difference that you can't with a straight arrow (ease of use)
3. It also takes a constant number of operations (best case scenario) compared to the straight arrow where the algorithm has to decide based on the percentage of how much of the straight arrow shape hovers over another file to select
> It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor.
Ockham's Razor. It really is that simple. Having had to do a lot of "dot art," in The Days of Yore, I understand perfectly, why this choice was made. Some systems did an "unfilled" arrow, with just the outer barbs. Same angle of the shaft, but the barbs were at 90 degrees. Leaning left was chosen, because of the prevalence of righties. The "unfilled" arrow was easier to confuse with the background.
I suspect that many of today's programmers would be absolutely aghast, at the resolution of our screens, back then.
Yup. The "stairs" of a 45° angle just looked visually smoother than an up-2-over-1 line which looked a bit jaggier. Not an earth-shattering difference, but a difference nonetheless.
Although the linked page was highly entertaining, I suspect (and this is pure speculation) that the real answer is that, to the people who had to make the original decisions back in the 70s and early 80s, the current design “looked better”.
For subsequent implementations it is likely mostly inertia.
Again this is all speculation but it doesn’t really have to be any more complex than that.
As a side note in the early 80s as a teenager I wanted to write a space game on my Apple //e computer that had a wedge shaped spacecraft like a star destroyer or the spacecraft from Asteroids. I spent many many hours hand drawing the bitmaps for each size and rotation. The shapes always looked a little jagged, except in the +/- 45 degree orientations.
Top answer [1] (when I'm looking, others seems to refer to other top answers) says that the original cursor _was_ straight, and links to an image, which 404's [2].
It also shows how absolutely horrid Windows' cursor designs are. They always were. I still remember making my own sets back in the early 2000s when DeviantArt was the home of desktop customization.
I'm surprised nobody has posited an "obscurity" rationale.
When the majority of your information is vertical/horizontal (such as text, window elements, etc), an angled cursor makes it easier to interpolate what's underneath. And the arrow shape keeps the bulk of the icon out of the way of your point of interest (compared to, for example, a reticle - although I expect we'd adapt just fine).
Most SO answers were non-answers or word salads. Thankfully one of you added an answer explaining that the cursor is already straight given that it must be visible from the graphics coordinate origin (upper left) and is 45 degrees wide.
It's funny how much of this stuff comes down to just "because that's how someone did it first". I see this mirrored in my own work, where so many arbitrary decisions are maintained for no reason other than that they were chosen at the outset. Nice to see that applies to basically everything.
Another reason is likely clipping. When drawing the cursor you have to prevent pixels from being drawn off screen to the right or bottom of the screen. If the cursor were symmetric, you would have to watch out for the left edge of the screen as well.
I'm amazed none of the answers are pointing out that a straight cursor is completely non-naturalistic. A cursor tilted to the left resembles an arrow being held in the right hand and being used to point at something.
As someone who played with the DOS text mode fonts a little, I never bothered with that question, assuming left tilt of the arrow was a way to make it visually bigger / more visible
I remember using a black rectangle as a mouse pointer in console based applications - it was literally one character of the console with inverted colors.
"When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor."
Well there ya go right there. The left side of the arrowhead is a nice clean straight line, and the right side of the arrowhead is as close as possible to 45 degrees, cutting down its "jaggedness".
The "saves a calculation" answer sounds like complete horseshit. Any machine fast enough to update a mouse cursor every time the mouse moves could have afforded two additional subtractions on a click event.
I guess the obsession to fix something that's wrong on the internet only applies to mistakes by other people, not one's own mistakes. Cuz really, it's the responsibility of other people to fix my mistakes.
Stratoscope|2 years ago
https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52349/43259
The problem with this idea is that the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh, there were many others including the text I-beam and a couple of kinds of crosshairs. And you could define any cursor of your own by providing a bitmap and transparency mask and the hotspot position.
You can see some of these cursors in the original Inside Macintosh Volume I and also in previous works from PARC.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230114223619/https://vintageap...
Page 50 of the PDF (page I-38 of the document) shows some sample cursors.
Page 158 of the PDF (page I-146 of the document) has the pixel detail and hotspot locations for several cursors.
Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).
Can anyone explain why? I think I used to know, but it has long since escaped my memory and I would appreciate a refresher.
This page also has the definition of the Cursor structure:
Point is defined on page I-139 and is more or less what you would expect, a pair of vertical and horizontal coordinates.To be clear, the scary part is not that someone came up with the idea that (0,0) saved a few instructions. In fact, the notion came up elsewhere in this HN discussion. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, until you realize that there are many cursor shapes that require different hotspots.
The scary part is that 188 people upvoted this answer!
speff|2 years ago
kristopolous|2 years ago
The linked SO page is a page of complete speculation.
History isn't just a bunch of logical thought exercises, it's an assembling of documentation and evidence.
As far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous documentation claiming intentionality so the question remains unanswered.
A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that cursor style in particular. I'd even accept a more minor source like Acorn, Digital Research, Quarterdeck, NeWS, VisiOn or MIT Athena (X).
Finding something that talks about say, lightpens and then defends the mouse cursor style in that way is working backwards from a hypothesis. It's weak and doesn't preclude other possibilities. Let's be rigorous and get it right.
zb|2 years ago
baxuz|2 years ago
There's an amazing video by Posy documenting mouse cursor history, and even provides his own cursor pack:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
jodrellblank|2 years ago
The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in another ten years and again and then you’ll die as “that weird cursor offset obsessed fanatic”.
jfk13|2 years ago
My assumption (not having an old Mac or documentation to confirm it...) is that the tip of the cursor had to be at (1, 1) to allow for a pixel's worth of mask around the outer edge of the tip.
fsckboy|2 years ago
the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor styles had settled down to some standards.
in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk selections also does not require accurate placement, although I think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.
early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.
Doxin|2 years ago
If you then design your cursor to be nice and pointy so it doesn't obscure the thing you're trying to click too much you end up with two angles where if you bisect them you're no longer at an integer ratio angle. So some fudging for the cursor tail is required.
Of course these days cursors are generally high resolution vector art, so none of the integer ratio angle concerns apply, but I assume most vector cursors originally got traced from their pixel predecessors.
This is all from memory and I was quite young back when any of this was relevant, so caveat emptor.
glitchc|2 years ago
Perhaps it's because cursors have a one pixel wide black border around them to enhance contrast, but users associate the cursor's position with the first bit of white (or color) at the tip. (0,0) is colored black for a typical cursor.
Edit: ninja'ed further down.
dukeofdoom|2 years ago
endgame|2 years ago
sobellian|2 years ago
lupire|2 years ago
teaearlgraycold|2 years ago
raffraffraff|2 years ago
Humans are tool makers and tool users. After enough time the tool becomes an extension of the body, even if the tip of the tool is mechanically or virtually detached from the hand that is controlling it. The tool maker designed this as a right-handed tool, coming into the frame in the right hand.
If the reason for the tilt direction was not this, then there would be no reason why it shouldn't tilt the other way. If you're right handed, try a right-leading cursor . It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks like a tool held in the left hand.
Does this have an effect on left-handed people? Perhaps. I'm left handed and it always felt wrong to use the mouse in my left hand. Is it because of the direction of the tilt? Who knows!
webignition|2 years ago
The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange to me in any way.
I've been using computer mice in one way or another for more than 30 years and perhaps a lack of oddness comes from having so very much gotten used to it. Maybe newer left-handed mouse users would find the cursor tilt strange?
vasco|2 years ago
m12k|2 years ago
Everything, or in this case the second answer on the linked page ;) I do believe you are (both) on to something though.
zeroimpl|2 years ago
naasking|2 years ago
It feels foreign only for a little bit. I'm right-handed but started developing RSI in my right wrist from using the mouse with that hand, so I've been using my left hand for over a decade now and no issues. The brain is very adaptable. For instance, we very quickly adapt to seeing the world upside down:
https://theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-res...
papichulo2023|2 years ago
a13o|2 years ago
TazeTSchnitzel|2 years ago
szundi|2 years ago
TOGoS|2 years ago
I say this because I use multiple computers and depending on when and where I am using them, sometimes want the mouse on the left. In addition to it "feeling wrong" to use a right handed cursor with my left hand (I swear it physically gives me cramps), having the cursor not match the buttons is super frustrating.
Once I got used to the direction of the cursor indicating the button configuration, it comes pretty naturally to click appropriately, even on occasions where I am using the mouse with the 'wrong' hand (because I'm using the other hand to pet a cat or drink my coffee or something).
On Windows 10/11, it's relatively easy to swap the buttons, but then I have to go into another, much more deeply buried menu (the old control panel that they seem to want to bury but can't get rid of because the Windows settings team is apparently too incompetent to put all the stuff you really need in the new configuration screens) to change the cursor to match. So then there's 5 seconds or so where the cursor doesn't match the button configuration during which my bones want to jump out of my wrist and then I need to go take a break. And for some reason, Windows 10 on my work computer seems to remember the button configuration but forget the cursor setting between reboots, so there's always a minute of confustion, there.
Also, if you're going to write some program with a cursor, DON'T OVERRIDE THE OS CURSOR WITH SOME {RIGHT|LEFT}-HANDED THING! I'm looking at dumb Acrobat Reader. The arrow in that program always points to the left even if I've flipped things in Windows, and then I get all confused when I try to click on the menus as if the mouse is in its right-handed configuration when it actually isn't.
I seem to recall some Linux distro that I used once upon a time getting this right, where there was an option to flip the cursor and the buttons at the same time. But I haven't seen that for a while.
Relatedly, why can't I have multiple cursors? There have been times when it would have been convenient to have a mouse plugged in on the left and the right and just have them both show up on the screen (pointing to the right and left, respectively, of course, with button configuration to match) so I could easily switch to whichever was more convenient at the time. Or for when $handedness-handed coworker wants to drive (just use the cursor that you normally would!). Best I found was some AutoHotKey script that didn't do quite what I wanted. Why does the OS layer need to assume exactly one cursor? Dumb if you ask me.
CharlesW|2 years ago
"The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with other things there, I designed and made many of the initial bitmap fonts). Then it stuck, as so many things in computing do."
¹ https://jameshk.com/mouse-cursor
jasomill|2 years ago
https://archives.loomcom.com/contraltojs/
and follow the instructions under "Running Smalltalk 76".
arduanika|2 years ago
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/faceboo...
giving the appearance that the mouse is tilted.
vintagedave|2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
It runs through the history of mouse cursors, as well as problems with some of the standard ones, and shows, among other things, historical cursors which were straight and not tilted.
It is one of those amazing videos that make the internet worthwhile, is short, and is by the author of Posy's Cursor Pack, http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
itomato|2 years ago
He never mentions the NeXT environment, DPS and differences in DPI, their own black and white arrow cursor, and how that cursor actually came into Mac OS X, not the one from System 1 and onward.
Hmm.
loceng|2 years ago
Shorel|2 years ago
I use his set on Windows (It looks awesome) and on Ubuntu, the Linux port from here:
https://github.com/simtrami/posy-improved-cursor-linux
hacb|2 years ago
behnamoh|2 years ago
https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...
simondotau|2 years ago
An alternative explanation is that this intentional imperfection exists to match the unavoidable imperfection which occurred when the cursor graphic was originally drawn as tiny low resolution 1-bit pixel art. It looks correct because we're used to it being slightly wrong. And when viewed at a normal size, the difference is barely perceptible anyway.
[0] https://mspoweruser.com/why-windows-10s-asymmetrical-cursor-...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TIHI/comments/fwnep0/thanks_i_hate_...
[2] edited, thanks jusuhi
wolpoli|2 years ago
mmerlin|2 years ago
wazoox|2 years ago
promiseofbeans|2 years ago
gjvc|2 years ago
account-5|2 years ago
[deleted]
Cockbrand|2 years ago
As an aside, as a typical Amiga quirk, the early Amiga mouse cursor was tilted in a 45° angle to the x axis, contrary to all the other popular GUIs with more acute angles for the cursor. And there was a built-in tool for creating custom mouse cursors, which I personally loved. See for example http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga12.html
Findecanor|2 years ago
The style was changed to a sharper point in Amiga OS 2.0 but it was still slanted 45°. First on the Amiga 1200/4000 with AGA could you get a high-resolution mouse pointer.
bhaak|2 years ago
Similar to the Macintosh mouse pointer the click point was not at (0,0) but at (1,1) (the orange point in the skin colored area in the editor on the linked page).
Feathercrown|2 years ago
stinos|2 years ago
For starters for normal desktop usage like >95% of the time the thing I want to click on isn't under the mouse yet so it doesn't obscure anything. Instead I move the mouse to it and by the time the mouse is there I don't care what is under it anymore because the decision to click it was made already.
Second when the mouse is over something I need to be able to read it seems I tend to move the mouse away (even when it's over text and turns into a straight cursor). The reason being that no matter what cursor is used its lines are typically wider and higher than the lines in rendered characters underneath so always obscures something. In other words: even if the cursor weren't tilted it would still obscure the same amount of surface, but just in a slightly different location. And that's really only slightly so for practical use won't matter.
Wrt where something is approached from: that depends on where the cursr is and where the target is. It would be really interesting to put this in a heatmap from daily usage, but I quickly checked some of the things I access often, like in my bottom taskbar and browser tab bar at the top, and since the things clicked often are both left and right of the screen and my cursor can be seeminlgy anywhere there might still be one approach direction used more but only by some marging.
Lastly most software I checked where obsucring could actually matter (e.g. CAD) uses custom cursors like 1 pixel wide crosses etc, not something tilted.
haunter|2 years ago
https://youtu.be/U9mWKwXfF6s?t=155s
al_borland|2 years ago
bluenose69|2 years ago
ulrischa|2 years ago
gjvc|2 years ago
anileated|2 years ago
A usual GUI for the most part has straight edges and certain symmetries. A cursor that is similarly symmetric will blend in more easily, and get visually lost.
Which way it tilts is secondary, the irregularity of the tilt itself against the rest of the interface is key.
swozey|2 years ago
raverbashing|2 years ago
wscourge|2 years ago
Random thought.
jusuhi|2 years ago
zoomablemind|2 years ago
Then, when implementing a more 'remote' on-screen pointer, the notion of pointing perpendicularly at the site was best projected by a tilted 2D marker.
Think of the mouse pointer kinda sticking out of the screen as a dart.
I can't imagine the arm strain the users of the light pen had to endure back in time ... Though the workflow was probably still more keyboard-bound.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen
elif|2 years ago
When you have so few pixels, you really want to be able to use the exact pixel you intend.
weinzierl|2 years ago
EDIT: Another thought that crossed my mind is that with very lo-res screens a corner is the only way to get a well defined and sharp (yet fairly wide) arrowhead. The trade-off would be the shaft being pixelated, but the tip is more important.
jusuhi|2 years ago
rgj|2 years ago
p-e-w|2 years ago
shahzaibmushtaq|2 years ago
For all practical purposes, I observed 2 other things.
The first is that English is written left to write. If you ever had the experience of using a different language that starts from right to left, this same arrow feels weird.
And the second is a little activity experience.
1. Arrange the 4 files in a square box, 2 up 2 down
2. Notice that as soon as the sharp point of the arrow touches any file boundary, the arrow can select the file by a pixel difference that you can't with a straight arrow (ease of use)
3. It also takes a constant number of operations (best case scenario) compared to the straight arrow where the algorithm has to decide based on the percentage of how much of the straight arrow shape hovers over another file to select
wooptoo|2 years ago
jasomill|2 years ago
Here's the power-on procedure for a UNIVAC I:
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/univac/univac1/UNIVAC...
ChrisMarshallNY|2 years ago
Ockham's Razor. It really is that simple. Having had to do a lot of "dot art," in The Days of Yore, I understand perfectly, why this choice was made. Some systems did an "unfilled" arrow, with just the outer barbs. Same angle of the shaft, but the barbs were at 90 degrees. Leaning left was chosen, because of the prevalence of righties. The "unfilled" arrow was easier to confuse with the background.
I suspect that many of today's programmers would be absolutely aghast, at the resolution of our screens, back then.
ResEdit FTW!
crazygringo|2 years ago
efitz|2 years ago
For subsequent implementations it is likely mostly inertia.
Again this is all speculation but it doesn’t really have to be any more complex than that.
As a side note in the early 80s as a teenager I wanted to write a space game on my Apple //e computer that had a wedge shaped spacecraft like a star destroyer or the spacecraft from Asteroids. I spent many many hours hand drawing the bitmaps for each size and rotation. The shapes always looked a little jagged, except in the +/- 45 degree orientations.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
wodenokoto|2 years ago
Anyone have a working link?
[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52338
[2] http://origin.arstechnica.com/images/gui/4-NLSgui.jpg
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
AndroTux|2 years ago
baxuz|2 years ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg
It also shows how absolutely horrid Windows' cursor designs are. They always were. I still remember making my own sets back in the early 2000s when DeviantArt was the home of desktop customization.
rkagerer|2 years ago
When the majority of your information is vertical/horizontal (such as text, window elements, etc), an angled cursor makes it easier to interpolate what's underneath. And the arrow shape keeps the bulk of the icon out of the way of your point of interest (compared to, for example, a reticle - although I expect we'd adapt just fine).
akarve|2 years ago
https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/149837/45927
pavel_lishin|2 years ago
Izkata|2 years ago
Also:
> Thankfully one of you
We can see your name.
ramesh31|2 years ago
stkdump|2 years ago
causality0|2 years ago
Izkata|2 years ago
oq_pmg|2 years ago
londons_explore|2 years ago
I remember using a black rectangle as a mouse pointer in console based applications - it was literally one character of the console with inverted colors.
kps|2 years ago
Yes. Set aside a few hours to watch ‘The Mother of all Demos’.
sergiotapia|2 years ago
Izkata|2 years ago
quesera|2 years ago
AtNightWeCode|2 years ago
LAC-Tech|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
euroderf|2 years ago
Well there ya go right there. The left side of the arrowhead is a nice clean straight line, and the right side of the arrowhead is as close as possible to 45 degrees, cutting down its "jaggedness".
mort96|2 years ago
ChrisArchitect|2 years ago
codesnik|2 years ago
amelius|2 years ago
mike_hock|2 years ago
jturolla|2 years ago
That was 10 years ago.
Is it right? Probably not.
Did I answer instinctively? Yes.
Is it a problem to keep it there? I don't think so, there are plenty of other explanations in the same page.
Am I providing further evidence? No.
Please refer to https://xkcd.com/386/
ant6n|2 years ago
UberFly|2 years ago
[deleted]