How to (easily) find your mouse cursor?

fonz · Sep 8, 2011

One of the (very few) things I actually like about Windows, is its "hit Ctrl to reveal mouse position" feature (which animates a few circles around the mouse cursor, which is real nice if you can't find it). Is there something like this available for X.Org?

Fonz

P.S. I'm posting this here in the X.Org forum because I'm looking for something that's independent of the WM/DE being used. More to the point: I don't use KDE and/or GNOME.

bes · Sep 8, 2011

Maybe :

Code:

xmessage -nearmouse "I'm here"

and to create appropriate keybind or alias ?

fonz · Sep 8, 2011

bes said:
Code:

xmessage -nearmouse "I'm here"

Thanks for the idea, it should work. At the moment xmessage keeps popping up in the upper left corner regardless of the mouse position, but that's probably Fvwm2 behaviour that I'll have to look into.

Fonz

bes · Sep 8, 2011

It probably is so , at least everything is working well in Openbox .

ChalkBored · Sep 9, 2011

Xeyes looks in the direction of the mouse cursor, suggestively.

graudeejs · Sep 9, 2011

ChalkBored said:
Xeyes looks in the direction of the mouse cursor, suggestively.

Ye, putting 2x xeyes, in 2 different corners of monitor, would be enough, to find mouse

Or you can put 3x xeyes, to be absolutely sure

bigtoque · Sep 9, 2011

Without trying to sound like an ass, what is the purpose of what you're asking? Why can't you see your cursor?

fonz · Sep 9, 2011

ChalkBored said:
Xeyes looks in the direction of the mouse cursor, suggestively.

Thanks for the idea.

The downside of x11/xeyes, though, is that it runs continuously. I'm not really concerned about the few little CPU cycles, but it does take up real estate. Besides, for some reason on my system xeyes causes a segfault that immediately kills the entire X session

And the South Park boys appear to have poor depth perception

However, I do have some ideas now so I will go off and tinker a bit. Thanks for the suggestions, everybody.

bigtoque said:
Without trying to sound like an ass, what is the purpose of what you're asking? Why can't you see your cursor?

I'm not sure what you're getting at, but let me put it this way: it really isn't all that difficult to "lose" the mouse pointer if you turn away from the screen (e.g. to consult a book or something). And moving the mouse around doesn't always help either, it depends on the applications you have open, how large their windows are and what (if anything) they do with the cursor. Although currently not applicable to me, I can also imagine that certain root images may make a cursor harder to find.

Fonz

wblock@ · Sep 9, 2011

With big monitors and low-contrast colors, it can be fairly easy to lose track of the pointer. With multiple monitors, even easier. An animated pointer locator that shows on all monitors would be useful. The pieces are there.

bigtoque · Sep 9, 2011

fonz said:
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but let me put it this way: it really isn't all that difficult to "lose" the mouse pointer if you turn away from the screen (e.g. to consult a book or something). And moving the mouse around doesn't always help either, it depends on the applications you have open, how large their windows are and what (if anything) they do with the cursor. Although currently not applicable to me, I can also imagine that certain root images may make a cursor harder to find.

wblock said:
With big monitors and low-contrast colors, it can be fairly easy to lose track of the pointer. With multiple monitors, even easier. An animated pointer locator that shows on all monitors would be useful. The pieces are there.

I really wasn't trying to get at anything, I had a bit of a bad night last night and I can see that it came out in my post.

I've never had any particular issue seeing my mouse, and didn't really think that everyone has a different setup. I can see how the feature could be useful to others (especially for anyone that has a hard time seeing - I'm thinking back to a time seeing a guy who was almost completely blind using some crazy contrast and magnifying setup).

Dumb post on my part. My apologies.

fonz · Sep 11, 2011

bigtoque said:
I can see how the feature could be useful to others (especially for anyone that has a hard time seeing

As far as I know my own vision is perfectly fine (being an aviator, it better damn well should be), but you'd be surprised to find out how many people have at least some form of visual impairment.

wblock said:
An animated pointer locator that shows on all monitors would be useful. The pieces are there.

I'll look into it. I happen to be quite busy at the moment, but I do think that this would be quite useful to many people so I'll see what I can conjure up.

Fonz (to be continued)