Grow mouse as option vs spotlight

microsoft / PowerToys

Windows system utilities to maximize productivity

MIT License

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Grow mouse as option vs spotlight #16645

Open Wizardling opened 2 years ago

Wizardling commented 2 years ago

Description of the new feature / enhancement

Right now with PowerToys you either press control twice (welcome to excluding sooo many apps) or shake the mouse (as of the latest version) to get an annoying spotlight effect centred on the mouse pointer, that dims the rest of the screen till you click somewhere.

Why not just… well, sorry, but why not just copy the more sensible, way less annoying method in macOS that lets you turn on temporary enlargement of the mouse pointer if you shake it? That's quick, less visually annoying, and goes away in a second without needing to do anything - perfect!

Scenario when this would be used?

Temporarily enlarging the mouse pointer when shaken is way more elegant, is far less annoying when accidentally activated, and requires no second step to dismiss the result.

Supporting information

https://support.apple.com/en-qa/guide/mac-help/mchlp2920/mac

Wizardling commented 2 years ago

I'll just add that as things stand, the find my mouse feature is undesirable enough that it's better just turned off - which I've done. But in macOS their way is so useful and unobtrusive I leave it permanently on.

crutkas commented 2 years ago

This is a user preference for style. For me personally, this is a very jarring experience and at times, not ideal. For you, this may be a great experience. We tried something new and the effect actually tells your eye based on motion where the mouse is.

Great feedback.

Chris2011 commented 2 years ago

I also love the growing mac mouse pointer. So this would be also a good option to say: "I want spotlight while shaking" or "growing/shrinking mouse pointer while shaking". I think this could be easy to implement I guess. Most of the stuff is still available so just growing and shrinking back to normal needs to be implemented.

Chris2011 commented 1 year ago

@crutkas hey, I will try to add this behavior if noeone else tried this before. Just to let you know.

crutkas commented 1 year ago

Think you’ll want to capture the mouse as an image and grow that vs the real cursor. Growing the actual cursor is a private api to best of my knowledge

Chris2011 commented 1 year ago

Think you’ll want to capture the mouse as an image and grow that vs the real cursor. Growing the actual cursor is a private api to best of my knowledge

Thank you very much for letting me know. Will have a look. This was really helpful.

Chris2011 commented 1 year ago

I think I have more than just this problem. What I already have:

Getting the current cursor and save it as an image (just a test, I just need the hcursor for this)
Set the system cursor SetSystemCursor, but here I need the ID for the cursor which I want to replace (Just tested with OCR_NORMAL)
Setting back the current system cursor by copying the last cursor (OCR_NORMAL again)

As you can see, for this I just need the ID of the cursor to set the old one back.

I also had another solution which is similar:

Use CreateCursor to just make a dummy cursor for testing
Increase this cursor to 256x256 to make this bigger as requested
Set the system cursor (OCR_NORMAL)
Wait (Just testing)
Set it back to the default one (no ID needed, I use SystemParametersInfo(SPI_SETCURSORS, 0, NULL, SPIF_SENDCHANGE);

Can I get the Cursor ID somehow programmatically? I will also have a look into mac function to see whether the pointer is also increasing when shaking or just the nornal arrow one.

Chris2011 commented 1 year ago

@crutkas do you have another hint for me? This is what I encountered after researching and testing.