elementary / gala

Gala Window Manager for elementary OS and Pantheon
https://elementary.io
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Add 'Presenter Mode' option for pointer #2059

Open wpkelso opened 1 month ago

wpkelso commented 1 month ago

Problem

When screen sharing or otherwise presenting one's screen, it can be hard to follow the mouse pointer. Simply making the cursor bigger could be a bit unwieldy to some, and the 'Find cursor' animation goes away too quickly to be used as a presentation pointer.

Proposal

Provide an option to enable a 'Presentation Pointer' mode, where the pointer is highlighted constantly with either the 'Find cursor' highlight or some other form of highlight like a colored ring.

Prior Art (Optional)

image

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wpkelso commented 3 weeks ago

Here is an exploration of what this could look like in an eos context. I've not reused the "find cursor" visual to differentiate the two and communicate that what's happening is not a visual bug. It's also using the same 30% darker border that is used in icons to help them stand out from the background

presenter-exploration

wpkelso commented 2 weeks ago

Windows PowerToys has a "Find my mouse" function in it's "Mouse Utilities" plugin that functions as below. I could see this as another avenue to take for this purpose

win-highlight-cursor-example

wpkelso commented 4 days ago

Here is an exploration of what this could look like in an eos context. I've not reused the "find cursor" visual to differentiate the two and communicate that what's happening is not a visual bug. It's also using the same 30% darker border that is used in icons to help them stand out from the background

Some further thinking on this concept: The interior of the ring could be used to show when a click has occurred, i.e. ring when just hovering, filled circle when a click has occurred. This acts less as strictly traditional red-dot style of presentation pointer, but could be more useful for a presentation style where one is interacting with elements on the screen (following links, etc.). As an illustration:

image

(The pointer has been roughly aligned to have the hotspot at the center of the ring)