There are a lot of interactions on a PC where user inputs land in the wrong place.
Claude Code and Codex in their various avatars allow us to type the next prompt while the agent is still working and responding on the earlier one. But this constantly runs into a permission prompt from running session -- either interrupting or worse entering a response to the permission prompt unintentionally.
Even during normal prompting slash commands interfere annoyingly with normal use of the slash key (i use a slash to indicate a list of two or more choices sometimes when i write).
Permission popups and confirmation dialogs that appear unexpectedly and swallow our keystrokes, spacebar and enter key hits mid sentence have always annoyed me.
Laggy devices, and resource hungry sluggish UIs compound this problem.
Saves you a bit of movement on large screens, but since it jumps it doesn’t lead the eyes which makes is disorienting.
i thought that was genius, until i upgraded to vim-motif, which would instead move the popup to where your mouse cursor is
Even major features in Adobe apps the furthest they go is those video popups rendered using webviews so they glitch into existence as a white box.
But yeah, it feels like somebody physically grabbing your hand and moving it.
I worked on several apps for the visually impaired that automatically move the mouse cursor to different UI elements in the front-most application, regardless of the window state. It’s a good reminder that “impossible” often just means “I haven’t accounted for that use case yet.”
That is quite a different statement from "It should be impossible." What should be impossible is for the OS to prevent this type of usage when it is clearly useful. Outside of accessibility, I use these features to automate native macOS GUI app testing.
In 25 years of developing software for Windows and macOS, I cannot recall a single instance of the mouse cursor moving unexpectedly.
I gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this:
I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions:
So seeing this now, yeah, I’d bundle this inside the “some interactions are 100% sacred” bucket, alongside focus never being hijacked randomly (especially in the middle of typing), avoiding scrolling anything until I specifically ask, undo and copy/paste needing utmost protection, and a few more.
In the opposite camp, here’s a fun new project by Neal Agarwal (only worth clicking on a computer with a mouse). This is a situation where it feels perfectly fine for a cursor to be hijacked; as a matter of fact, there is something really interesting about a mouse pointer feeling less like a deity floating above it all, and more like a regular in-game actor.
This reminded me of that time, in the earlier days of Figma, when I prototyped an interaction where you could select someone else’s pointer and press Backspace to delete it:
We didn’t seriously consider it because it felt just too weird, and not that effective in solving “the other person’s cursor is distracting me” problem. But today it feels like it belongs to the same category as the two examples above.
I’ll let you decide if it’s closer to Agarwal’s delight or Lightroom’s terror.