So I like this MacOS feature where your cursor displays in large. I was hoping if anyone knew of such software that replicates this functionality for Linux. Considering MacOS and Linux are both Unix, and libraries are different, could X or Wayland help replicate this?
On my Mac running yabai it sometimes gets into this weird state where the mouse does this as it toggles rapidly back and forth between some windows. No idea what causes it…
On Linux I run i3 which kinda negates the need for the mouse finder since it will move the cursor to the active window.
I guess I didn’t remotely answer you question though!
KDE Plasma has a desktop effect called "Track Mouse" after you activate it you can use it by pressing Ctrl+Meta. It doesn't look like the MacOS variant, but it does the job.
Thanks for pointing that out, I found the setting on my laptop and tried it out. I do like the jiggle approach better, though, simply because that is something many people (myself included) instinctively do when losing track of the mouse cursor.
Apple software team is on another level. You don’t even have to try to find the feature. We all instinctively shake the mouse to locate the cursor, so it just happens.
Gnome is the desktop environment. You may have gnome already installed if that’s what your OS uses, otherwise you probably have KDE. There are others but those are the 2 big ones.
The Desktop Environment is what gives the OS its look, and typically which GUI programs are installed by default.
That’s just scratching the surface. You can go even deeper and „make your own” desktop environment. Desktop environment is kind of like a pack of software that has a cohesive look and feel. You can leave that and pick and choose programs on your own and configure them to your liking. You can configure KDE or gnome, but this gives you even more control :)
Back to the to the topic, yes, Linux is not technically Unix by pedigree. In practice, it doesn’t matter that it isn’t and it wouldn’t matter if it were, both for this issue in particular and for most others you are likely to encounter.
The actually relevant technology here is the graphics subsystem, and MacOS’s Cocoa has always been radically different from anything else in the Unix/Linux space. There is no relation whatsoever to either X11 or Wayland. The only thing worth “porting” here is the basic idea. Which is pretty neat, though. Let’s hope Apple hasn’t patented it.
If it was, I don’t think it was a default. I had been using Windows 7 for quite a while back in the day, and I cannot remember ever seeing something like this. On the other hand, I can certainly remember losing track of where on my monitors my mouse cursor was on various occasions…
IIRC, the windows version of this is a setting where you can hit CTRL and it makes a moderately large circle that contracts towards the pointer. It's been in since at least W7/Vista, possibly XP. I've used it on and off for years (especially with 3 27" monitors) because of how easy it is to lose the cursor.
And that functionality is in Gnome, but disabled by default IIRC. I’ve had it on for years in both PopOS and Debian so I may be wrong but I do believe it’s a Gnome feature.
Quartz is the old macOS graphics framework, but the mouse shaking is probably just a cool show off feature of Core Animation. There’s uncontested Windows ports on GitHub, so I doubt Apple will throw any fits for Linux.
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