this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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A lot of software packages have existed across multiple OSes and graphical environments to provide some way to make the mouse cursor more visible, whether via creating trails or a screen-spanning crosshair or various other forms of functionality.
I don't know if that functionality is necessary, but I think that as a lot of people have moved to higher-and-higher resolution screens, that the mouse pointer defaults have not really kept pace. Like, the default mouse pointer size should maybe be larger. On my desktop system, I recently started using a monitor at a higher resolution of 165 ppi, and by default, sway didn't increase the mouse pointer size; I lost track of the pointer multiple times. I wound up resolving that with:
in my ~/.config/sway/config file to get a 48 pixel pointer.
I'm pretty sure that most desktop environments have some mechanism to increase pointer size, and my thinking is that the default should perhaps be to try to cover a larger portion of the user's visual arc than is currently the case.
The ideal would be to base it on visual arc...but that requires knowing how far the user is sitting from the monitor. We do have the ability to get physical monitor dimensions from the monitor, which gives ppi, which is part of the problem, but not how far the user is located from the monitor.
Laptops often have integrated webcams, and if their field of view were queryable (which, AFAIK, is not currently the case) that could let one compute that distance to the user's face using a webcam image, as long as they're using the integrated monitor. With desktops or external monitors, though...we don't generally have that monitor-surface-aligned webcam.
That leaving trails feature was more designed for very old school LCDs with extremely slow refresh time, but yeah indeed it was a feature to help visibility.
It's true that there was an type of early LCDs that had very slow response rates and that that produced a visual artifact, a visible trail behind the pointer (as well as ghosting behind anything moving). I've used those displays. But that's not what I'm talking about. There was also software that explicitly drew pointer trails to make the pointer more visible.
searches
This kind of stuff.
No shit Watson, that's exactly what I'm talking about.
My first laptop was a Toshiba 1950CT from 1994, upgraded from Windows 3.1 to 95. The screen refresh time (not to be confused with vertical refresh rate), was about a half a second.
Move the mouse pointer, it would take about half a second before the old cursor faded out and the new position cursor appeared.
I had my cursor trails set to either 2 or 3 on that thing, because moving the cursor at all made it otherwise totally disappear while the screen faded in and out between frames.