I was looking up web developer portfolios on (( the other site )) and came across this one: https://m7mad.dev/

It has a target for the cursor instead of a mouse. While I think most modern web developers do a lot of unnecessary bullshit to “show off” and justify their existence, this particular design got me thinking.

Why do we have a “mouse” for a cursor? Does it really make more sense than have a target similar to the one on this site?

I think most of us don’t even bother to question it, myself included, but it might just be one of those weird relics of the past that we accepted because we thought others knew more than us.

  • ProfessorScience@lemmy.worldEnglish
    16·
    2 days ago

    I think another part of it is being able to see what you’re clicking on. You want cursor pixels near the click target because they can show you where you’re clicking. But you also want the area around the target to be clear so you can see what you’re clicking on. Putting all of the “show me where I’m clicking” pixels on one side leaves as much space free to see what you’re clicking on as possible.

  • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
    10·
    1 day ago

    In the early days of Windows, it was semi-common for people to customize their cursors. You’d see some pretty weird and fun stuff sometimes.

    I think Windows becoming the standard locked-down for work platform contributed to stifling that creative impulse in users.

    • hesh@quokk.auEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      Windows really had a character and fun to it for a brief window

    • MagicShel@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Also there was a lot of mouse cursor shovelware and malware that would hijack your browser. The reason it went away is because everyone kept installing malware on their work computers and we had to shut that shit down. Corporate virus scanners contributed more to killing custom mouse cursors than Microsoft did.

  • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    The off center asymmetric design makes it easier to locate on screen as it does not blend into other background patterns as easily as a cross. I imagine that was the initial design idea.

  • cally [he/they]@pawb.socialEnglish
    5·
    2 days ago

    Warning: This is a guess, don’t take my comment as fact! :3

    I think it’s a relic from the past, because computers do images from left-to-right, top-to-bottom, so, since your mouse cursor is an image, the top-left corner is the origin. Maybe it was too much of a hassle to center the crosshair on the origin, and instead developers or designers came up with the arrow shape.

    Since the arrow works fine, it became what’s most commonly used nowadays. The crosshair and dot have a different meaning, for example there’s a cross when resizing or dragging, and drawing programs usually use a dot or a tiny circle instead of the arrow.