Animated Cursors (tattoy.sh)
218 points by speckx a day ago
__MatrixMan__ 35 minutes ago
I've not heard of tattoy but I'm glad I ran across it. Most of its usage is not to my taste, but it appears to scratch an itch I've had for some time. I've been chewing on this idea for a... terminal emulator? shell? editor plugin?... something where you could annotate an error message with something like:
> This is fixed in the next release, nothing to see here
or
> I think think one is actually a problem, see issue 1657
And then your coworkers could view the logs in some way (special terminal emulator? piped through some kind of filter? idk) and your annotations would appear in a column next to the logs, perhaps with some background coloring to indicate which annotation goes with which log message. This way you don't all duplicate the effort of deciding whether this particular error is worth worrying about--instead you'd leave notes right there on the error (anchored via context triggered piecewise hashes).
The tattoy protocol seems like it be a good way to apply the highlighting on the logs whenever one that has a matching annotation appears on screen (https://tattoy.sh/docs/plugins/).
baq a day ago
This is way cooler than I expected.
It's an over-the-top animation of a terminal cursor moving from position to position, helps notice where it moved to. I thought it'll be something about mouse cursor animations. I could see myself using this if a) I was using more TUI apps and b) it'd be toned down quite a bit.
jasonjmcghee a day ago
I think was popularized by Neovide
nine_k a day ago
Here it's less dramatic and hence more useful.
I wish more terminals implemented something similar.
tombh 21 hours ago
danieldk 11 hours ago
Kitty also supports them with the cursor_trail option: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.cursor_trail
echelon a day ago
I never knew this was a thing.
This is so fucking cool. I'm going to add this right away.
tombh 21 hours ago
The home page has GIFs of both a simpler smear-fade cursor and a wilder manga-slash cursor https://tattoy.sh
rendaw 9 hours ago
Where? I only see the fire one too.
ldjb 9 hours ago
Rendello 21 hours ago
Reminds me of the old Compiz plugin that would make your windows burst into flames on closing.
andrepd 21 hours ago
Compiz effects was truly the killer feature for Linux for 12 year old me :)
Rendello 14 hours ago
bombela 2 hours ago
This looks cool. I am a bit off topic here. But my only fear is this entices some people to make it the default in terminals over time.
Like all moderne UIs now have animations, ranging from very slow to barely fast enough for my personal perception.
And it becomes increasingly hard to disable those animations. They creep up absolutely everywhere. And they drive me crazy. I want my computer to act instantaneously. Redraw within 8ms.
Almost all animations are also impossible to abort or skip. Worse plenty will animate concurrently. So you might be jumping around on a webpage faster than the animation, which then jumps you back to then slowly animate.
My life on this planet is finite. A computer isstupidly fast. Why waste my precious lifetime? How many minute of life do developers of animations steal from people?
I do understand that I process visual stimulus faster than most people. Making me an outlier. Modern interfaces are devoided of identifiable buttons and all look like a smear of emptiness with a few dollops of text and burger icons to interact with. Making it hard to notice what changed between two actions. Maybe increasing the need for animations to help people follow
In any case, I suffer greatly with animations.
kingforaday 21 hours ago
I applaud this effort and think it is amazing graphically for a tty, but serious question: does anyone use this as their daily driver?
tombh 20 hours ago
I'm the creator of Tattoy, so thanks. A significant part of the motivation for the project is that it's fun, like a "toy", as the name suggests. I do use it everyday, but only for one serious usecase, to allow my Twitch chatters to visually interact with my terminal by sending emotes to it. I'm not personally into the animated cursors, they were just easy to implement because I'd already built out support for Ghostty's background shaders.
But, if you want a truly serious usecase, then my pipe dream is that Tattoy becomes the "XWayland" for an entirely new protocol for terminals that explores moving on from ANSI codes, the terminfo database and so on. I wrote a blog post about this idea: https://tattoy.sh/news/an-end-to-terminal-ansi-codes
VTimofeenko 15 hours ago
As in the cursor trailing to new position? I use it, albeit on a different emulator.
Greatly helps when demoing something from my terminal and having multiple splits open.
magicalhippo 13 hours ago
Looks very nice and fun, and potentially very useful. I was going to say I'd prefer a gradient effect to emulate motion blur, but stepping through the video I see you've already implemented something like that.
However, when making large moves, it seems a bit disorienting and the gradient effect seems very subtle in the video. Perhaps make the effect depend on distance, like actual motion blur would?
I was also thinking about having a color shift when moving up vs moving down, not sure about that one but certainly something I'd play with.
tombh 3 hours ago
I think this is something that is quite actively being explored in the Ghostty community. And Tattoy automatically benefits from that because it supports the very same cursor shaders. You could check out the Ghostty Discord if you're interested. And of course you can experiment with your own cursor shaders, they follow the same syntax as Shader Toy: https://tattoy.sh/docs/shaders
thanhhaimai 20 hours ago
For a demo of the new Cursor feature in Ghostty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwDjM7pNNE
coldblues 21 hours ago
Emacs has https://github.com/Malabarba/beacon
pimlottc a day ago
I assumed this meant mouse cursors, so I was confused why the pointer didn’t move in the same video. Would have been better just to turn it off for the recording.
isoprophlex a day ago
Barely useable, pfff. Needs at least two out of three of
- airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,
- a sixel-based rendering of lens flares, or
- a fluid dynamics engine to simulate rippling of characters around the path along which the cursor moves
(Joke, looks very cool even though i'd probably find it too distracting)
Nevermark a day ago
> - airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,
I will take the light saber sounds.
With stereo-spacial transformation, so the sounds "direction" and "distance" match my own physical dynamic orientation relative to the cursor's motion on the screen.
And, the ability to open a small window, which gives me the cursor's visual point-of-view, as it zooms through the graphics on the screen.
Also, each traversed character should get "hot" as the curser goes over it, indicated with a stable glow for a quarter of a second, followed by an exponential fade over another second.
I think we can all agree that when in flow, functional distractions need to work harder, be more immersive, to be effective.
0xFEE1DEAD 7 hours ago
Testimonial:
> I've never been asked to pair up eversince I've started using tattoy
somat 20 hours ago
Here you go.
ionwake 20 hours ago
I installed it with homebrew but I dont see this shader tracer, I even see the blue pixel top right. Ive read the docs but it doesnt seem to explain if I need to do anything further which means it must be my already customised iterm which is the issue. Ill see if I can sort it.
tombh 20 hours ago
The creator here, sounds like I need to improve the docs. Did you set `enabled = true` in the `[animated_cursors]` section of the config? If so, then this could be bug, and I'd be very grateful for a report in the repo's issues: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy
Vlasar 13 hours ago
Sorry if I’m missing something, but isn’t the homebrew version outdated?
tombh 3 hours ago
ionwake 20 hours ago
tbh im not sure what Im doing wrong, I already have a highly customised iterm window and have spent a hour with chatgpt trying to troubleshoot this to no avail... must just be my setup for some reason. I will let you know if I figure it out - thanks
eviks 12 hours ago
Have you ever lost track of the cursor to require a trail? (and if yes, what shape/color was the cursor)
iforgotpassword 10 hours ago
Yes, happens occasionally. I just wiggle it left/right or up/down so I can see where it is. No big deal. But put of curiosity I might still try that one day, with a more subtle effect though. ;)
eviks 10 hours ago
What's the shape/color? I guess, non-blinking?
(they have other effects, check effects in neovide for better defaults)
ipsum2 16 hours ago
Wonder what this looks like in asciinema. Does it show up properly?
I wasn't able to get this working. MacOS, homebrew, added [animated_cursor] to the tattoy.toml and the glsl file.
tombh 16 hours ago
It very much should work on asciinema, it's all pure text after all.
I'd very much appreciate a bug report. It looks like maybe Tattoy isn't connecting to the GPU on Mac: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/129
mholm a day ago
iTerm2 has a basic animated cursor that I like, just a frame or two long, and fairly subtle. It would be nice if it expanded to support this type of animation, I do wish it were a bit more visible (though not, perhaps, the EDM show presented)
knodi123 2 hours ago
This (OP) project is inspired by neovide, a recent neovim gui. And iterm2's animated cursor is a brand new feature, also inspired by neovide.
Honestly, iterm2 is way too nice a piece of software considering the price. A real labor of love from a guy who apparently has lots more free time than me. :-)
renewiltord a day ago
This is pretty cool. Helps trace where the cursor is going. I prefer the Ghostty style now that I see it, but nonetheless cool UI feature.
getflourish 20 hours ago
Inspiring. So cool, yet useful.
o11c 21 hours ago
Honestly, just `:set cursorcolumn` is far more useful. Less distractions at the moment of change, but still visible if you alt-tab back.
dangoodmanUT 21 hours ago
i swear to god i can hear the laser sounds
incognito124 20 hours ago
Love to see another atuin user