Why is the mouse cursor slightly tilted and not straight?

It's a bit scary to see that one of the highest-voted answers to this question (188 points) is completely wrong. It says that the (0,0) hotspot simplified the calculations for a cursor position update, because you didn't have to add any (X,Y) offset.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52349/43259

The problem with this idea is that the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh, there were many others including the text I-beam and a couple of kinds of crosshairs. And you could define any cursor of your own by providing a bitmap and transparency mask and the hotspot position.

You can see some of these cursors in the original Inside Macintosh Volume I and also in previous works from PARC.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230114223619/https://vintageap...

Page 50 of the PDF (page I-38 of the document) shows some sample cursors.

Page 158 of the PDF (page I-146 of the document) has the pixel detail and hotspot locations for several cursors.

Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).

Can anyone explain why? I think I used to know, but it has long since escaped my memory and I would appreciate a refresher.

This page also has the definition of the Cursor structure:

  TYPE Bits16 = Array[0..15] OF INTEGER;

  Cursor = RECORD
      data:    Bits16;  {cursor image}
      mask:    Bits16;  {cursor mask}
      hotSpot: Point;   {point aligned with mouse}
  END;

Point is defined on page I-139 and is more or less what you would expect, a pair of vertical and horizontal coordinates.

To be clear, the scary part is not that someone came up with the idea that (0,0) saved a few instructions. In fact, the notion came up elsewhere in this HN discussion. It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, until you realize that there are many cursor shapes that require different hotspots.

The scary part is that 188 people upvoted this answer!

It's only scary at the beginning. Then you get used to it. Every single social media site - including HN - has uninformed people agreeing that a correct-sounding answer must be right. My friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work. My wife the linguist gets downvotes for explaining no that's not how language works. It's not scary - it's typical.

my friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work.

Let me guess: Tax brackets? That's the one thing that most regular workers in the US just don't seem to understand (and arguably, many people knowingly spread falsehoods to further some agenda).

I think the basic thing about taxes that is least understood is the difference between gross income and taxable income (the latter is the amount that tax brackets apply to). A close second is the difference between tax liability, and refund/balance due on the tax return.

Just try to convince the average person that “getting a big refund” is a bad thing, since it means you gave the U.S. government an interest free loan.

Oh yes, that's another fun one! Your yearly tax return should be as close to 0 as possible, otherwise you're either over- or under-withholding. Then again, I met some people that use it as a kind of piggy bank because they wouldn't be disciplined enough to save up for bigger purchases otherwise and... well, I can't even, but if it works for them, there are worse things to spend money on.

I have income from multiple sources and they are not aware of each other. For example, they will all keep paying social security even when I’ve exceeded the max deduction. It is far too complicated to correct the finance departments of multiple companies. I just reconcile it all at the end of the year and get a refund. Got a better strategy I can use?

You can file a W-4 with exemptions and avoid overwithholding! This is a fixable problem.

How do I use a w4 to fix the social security problem without incurring underpayment of state and federal? Exemptions apply to all the taxes, no?

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-4

Fill it out correctly and your employers will do the right thing.

I think the W-4 only applies to federal income tax. There's no field that instructs employers how much to pay in FICA (their share and yours). At best you can reduce withholdings to account for the excess FICA payments.

Not sure about state, but you don't pay Federal Income and FICA separately. They are just numbers that get added together. You just pay money, and the IRS splits it up after they collect. If you "overpay" Income by $1000 and "underpay" FICA by a $1000, you're done, no problem.

FICA cap is per employer, not total. Is that what you're referring to?

FICA cap is not per employer. Well, it is from a withholding perspective (only because it would be impractical to make employers monitor withholding outside their control), but once you do your taxes for that year, you’ll get everything you paid in over the cap refunded.

Right, but employers aren't allowed to coordinate to calculate whether the hit the cap together or not. They don't have that discretion. See

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-26/part-31#p-31.3121(a)(1...

If your separate income streams are pretty predictable and so is the overwitholding, and if you care enough: you can put a negative number in the "extra witholding" box on your W-4.

I wouldn't say this is a better strategy, but you can definitely min/max this even if your income is not stable by extrapolating out your expected income and expected witholding a few times a year and adjusting your W-4 based on your calculations.

Wow I wouldn't trust that. I'd add extra exemptions plus a positive withholding if needed.

It sounds like you’re not one of the people they met who use it like a piggy bank. From my perspective, they’re just describing the habits of people who are used to not having any money: gotta spend this windfall quick because money doesn’t last long. It’s irrational and ultimately harmful but it’s borne from the practice of spending all of your money every month on non-trivial things and still being required to increase debt in order to stay in your apartment, e.g., credit card spending.

It's not necessarily irrational. For example, for some people if they ever have any extra money, someone else will immediately spend it for them. If the earner wants to make a larger purchase, perhaps something that will cost short term but pay off in the long term, they need some mechanism to save, outside of the regular controls that apply to daily life.

You may think this situation is still irrational, that the other person is being irrational. But again, there are many life situations out there. Perhaps they have lived in situations where they had to fight for what they needed. Perhaps they lived with an earner who would spend their money on drugs if it wasn't taken away, and yet if the non-earner saved it up themselves, the earner would find it and spend it.

The supposedly rational thing may depend on everyone around you to also be rational, and everyone around them, etc. And given that we are human, and humans are not fully rational...

Woah, it’s okay to have different tax situations. I started a business one year and got a pretty big refund. But we’re not out there bragging about how we get big refunds every year like it’s some goal to aim for and accomplishment to be proud of if achieved. That’s the mentality people are criticizing.

By the interest free loan logic, you should have your employer withhold zero and then you put your taxes in a high yield savings account and pay them all as late as possible.

The IRS already thought of this - they charge you interest on the money you owed them (with some exceptions, like waiving it the first year it happens, only charging you if you withheld less than last year, etc).

Not sure I understand. Taxes are due in April. You don’t get charged a year of interest on the amount you own when filing…

https://www.irs.gov/payments/underpayment-of-estimated-tax-b...

Yeah, it sucks that the IRS is such a buzz-kill here, with 4-5% HYSA's, it would be nice to just let all the taxes sit there and pay one lump sum in April.

I owed a decent chunk more one year due to investments I sold, and left the money in tbills since I knew I was withholding at least as much as the previous year.

The interest rate is also much higher than you can earn on anything risk free (8% right now) plus there’s penalties on top.

(Not from the US) Why is it a good thing to lend for free to the US gov ? Because the regional banks aren’t that stable ?

It is not a good thing because it is interest free and inflation exists. If you would have had that money earlier you could have put it in high yield saving account or payed down debt.

It is not interest free. E.g., I was paid $480 in interest on overpayments last year.

It is interest free if the IRS pays you within N days of you filing. If they're slower, then they pay interest.

Where N is some value between like .... 30 and 90? I forget.

“Look! I filed my taxes and I got money back! Yay money!” (Could have had that money all along.)

The people that enjoy a tax refund would not really even notice the small amount they "could have had all along" by adjusting their withholding amounts.

People like getting the big lump sum and some don't even realize it was their money all along that they just overpaid throughout the year. It's not a good thing for individuals to overpay.

Nah, because for people with poor financial skills, the ability to save is very difficult (even if they had the "Extra" money in their account each pay period instead of paying extra taxes). So even though you're technically getting your money "back", for some people they would not have been successful to 'save' so much without it being forced on them.

That's not how the Earned Income Tax Credit works....

The average person is a financial train wreck of dumpster fires.

Decent guess, but nah. Something to do with corporate tax accounting. Can't remember the details because that's out of my element.

And yet here you are trying to spread an agenda in a thread about mouse pointers that taxes are too low because the majority of people are too stupid to understand tax brackets.

The way I internalize it: public voting selects for layman plausibility, not correctness.

Because laymen massively outnumber experts, the layman vote always overwhelms the informed one, so the reaction of people who don’t know the subject is the only thing that matters. Truth only seems to matter because most subjects either can be somewhat intuited by non-experts, or are in a niche that you’re not, so “layman plausibility” means your reaction, too. But the true nature of the dialog reveals itself as soon as people talk about something you’re an expert on.

Answers like this aren’t a bug in a truth machine, they’re a plausibility machine working as designed.

there's another reason for some optimism about a voting-truth connection: wisdom of the crowds. As long as there isn't a strong bias to people's estimate, the average will converge on the truth.

I am quite unsure as to the veracity of the claim that "the average will converge [upon] the truth". I recall cases being made (as asides) for the opposite conclusion. Intuitively even, this idea of equating truth with convergance towards the average opinion appears contradictory, counterfactual, and ahistorical. Excuse my being brass, but a "wisdom of crowds" seems to me oxymoronic on its face. I'd love to be persuaded otherwise though; mainly due to my perception of a lack of credence towards your view. Perhaps I have misunderstood your qualifier: "As long as there isn't a strong truth bias to people's estimate . . . "? Off the top of my head, I can't imagine any scenario in which a mixed population of laypeople and academics/experts would converge towards the same (vote average) findings as a sample of a handful of experts/academics. For example, would The Average converge towards correct mathematics or physics answers? Besides trivial, non-technical questions that do not require complex analysis, I think not. (See: False Memory: Mandela Effect. [0] [note]) [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_cascade [Note]: My point is that groups' thinking is liable to be compromised. (After all, what has been more important to a human — evolutionarily: the truth or social access?) Also see: Information Cascade. [1] {Post-Scriptum: My position is that if averages for answers to questions were taken, from the 'crowd' of the whole Earth, then these would diverge significantly and routinely from The Truth. If there are cases in which you feel this to not be the case I would inquisitively consider such scenarios waveBidder.} <Edit: Deletion: " . . . ~difficulty in lending~ . . . ">

That only works when people bet that their guess is correct.

Wisdom of the crowds is obviously dog shit.

Unfortunately not, because wisdom of the crowds requires not only a lack of bias but independence which, let’s face it, is usually impossible achieve.

As we know in the age of the internet, truth doesn't matter, only popularity does.

The internet has taught me how many brilliant people there are out there. And how massively outnumbered they are by the rest of us!

It's amazing how far that can take you. I saw a post on another social media site about something being wrong, and a comment said it's not wrong, it was just missing a "not". Which was the exact reason it was entirely wrong.

So people can state absolute absurdities and have people agree.

"So people can state absolute absurdities and have people agree"

That Reddit mission statement.

Happens on HN all the time too.

Some people are able to correct typos when reading.

But Reddit is exceptionally bad at this though. It's basically about what sounds the most positive for the upvoter's way of thinking rather than anything else.

Reddit is a place where you get downvoted for linking something that proves what someone was saying is wrong just because it goes against the site’s overall narrative. Lies are encouraged if they’re the correct lies.

The exact same can be said for academia

It's also typical to stand up in the audience of the kindergarten nativity and shout "Mary and Joseph weren't wearing teatowels on their heads!" and when the other parents turn and angrily "ssssh!" you, shout "shhh'd for telling the TRUTH! I thought this was a place of education and learning! Stay classy, parents".

"Happy birthday dear grandma, happy birthday to youuuu"

"Grandma's birthday was YESTERDAY you fuckin' liars!"

"My friend the tax accountant gets downvoted for clarifying how taxes actually work."

"My wife the linguist gets downvotes for explaining no that's not how language works."

A casual chat interrupted by tax pedantry and grammar naziing. I have no idea why people wouldn't want that. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

To be honest, I was debating on even posting my message initially. It was off topic but I figured it would've been ignored. If I knew it was going to derail the discussion about Stratoscope's analysis that much, I wouldn't've posted it.

Edit: Also grammar nazi'ing has little to do with linguistics and more to do with being a jerk...usually.

This is why I ask for qualifications when someone has an authoritative tone.

It is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, but on social media:

The phenomenon of people trusting newspapers for topics which they are not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing them to be extremely inaccurate on certain topics which they are knowledgeable about.

Is it not possible to be both scary and typical?

I think this also partly explains the LLM hype — people can be as confidently incorrect as LLMs, or maybe LLMs are as confidently incorrect as humans since they are trained on text from social media.

Hackernews is similar to ChatGPT in that regard. Lots of correct sounding answers that are really just a word salad.

I've noticed whenever a topic comes up that I have a lot of knowledge in, people almost always chime in with incorrect or just flat out made up stuff. I always remain suspicious of anything I read in any comment section. Including here on HN.

whoe political movements are built on this kind of momentum

The arrow has a white outline around it, so the hotspot is at the tip of the black arrow, at (1,1).

And if I'm not wrong, it still applies to today's Mac interface. The cursor still has a white outline all around.

Yup. You can even customise both the inner and outer colours as an accessibility feature!

What??? TIL.

A lot of the accessibility features are actually neat even to those without the need for them.

Yeah, it’s become super useful for me to color code the cursors between my work and personal Macs.

Bingo! Now that you jogged my memory, I can confirm this.

The next question is why you need a white outline around the black arrow.

This is easy to answer: if you didn't do that, what would the black arrow look like against a black background?

Some DE solved that by having an inverse outline.

Took me a really long pause to think up what DE meant, so to save others from similar waste “desktop environment”

I'm pretty sure even on windows there is the option of having the whole cursor be the inverse of the background

You can see similar things in the Apple Lisa source code as well: https://info.computerhistory.org/apple-lisa-code

The linked SO page is a page of complete speculation.

History isn't just a bunch of logical thought exercises, it's an assembling of documentation and evidence.

As far as I can see, there is no contemporaneous documentation claiming intentionality so the question remains unanswered.

A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that cursor style in particular. I'd even accept a more minor source like Acorn, Digital Research, Quarterdeck, NeWS, VisiOn or MIT Athena (X).

Finding something that talks about say, lightpens and then defends the mouse cursor style in that way is working backwards from a hypothesis. It's weak and doesn't preclude other possibilities. Let's be rigorous and get it right.

A smoking gun would be a file with a name like cursor.bitmap or some code like "declare cursor_default = [ [ 1, 0 ... ] ];" from a major source (ms/xerox/apple) say, pre-1988 or so, with some comment above it explaining the rationale of why that cursor style in particular.

The Inside Macintosh pages from 1985 I cited above may be what you're looking for.

Especially page 158 (I-146).

It doesn't give a longwinded rationale of why you need an X/Y hotspot offset, it does much better than that. It shows you several cursors with their hotspots, so you can see why a hotspot is needed. And it lists the data structure to support it.

but that is 4 years later than the xerox optical mouse tech report, and from a different company which copied their default mouse pointer style from xerox. it doesn't bear on the question of whether xerox was implementing cursors without hotspot coordinates at the time that they adopted the left-leaning shape

(i suspect xerox mouse cursors always had variable hotspot coordinates because it's, what, six microseconds extra in the screen update to subtract them? and i think smalltalk-76 mouse cursors have hotspots. but 01988 or even 01985 is way too late)

Within 8 thousand years, people will figure out variable length storage and processing for integers. I promise.

The second-highest answer is an incorrect just-so myth. It even includes a screenshot of the historically correct answer!

I was hoping that it would be lower than 188 when I clicked. It's not. (196):-(

As you said ten years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841

The scary part is that you will likely be saying it again in another ten years and again and then you’ll die as “that weird cursor offset obsessed fanatic”.

The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1). > Can anyone explain why?

My assumption (not having an old Mac or documentation to confirm it...) is that the tip of the cursor had to be at (1, 1) to allow for a pixel's worth of mask around the outer edge of the tip.

Fun fact! The hotspot for the arrow cursor was not (0,0) but was (1,1).

Perhaps it's because cursors have a one pixel wide black border around them to enhance contrast, but users associate the cursor's position with the first bit of white (or color) at the tip. (0,0) is colored black for a typical cursor.

Edit: ninja'ed further down.

the arrow pointer was never the only cursor. On the first Macintosh

the first macintosh was very late to the party, there had already been GUI cursors for about a decade at PARC, and cursor styles had settled down to some standards.

in the early days of GUI cursors on relatively low resolution displays (by today's standards), an important issue was to reduce the amount of calculation and squinting the human had to do to identify the hotspot so you could accurately select/swipe what you wanted to. the tilted arrow cursor points right at its hotspot quite effectively even if the tip pixel is blurred, as does the i-beam (whose vertical offset is not as important to know accurately) the five fingered hand for moving bulk selections also does not require accurate placement, although I think the hotspot is at the end of a finger.

early GUIs let you edit your own cursors and hotspots.

I think you touched on a wider problem. Peoples shallow understanding of the world, translates to a shallow world view and policies. It's kind of scary to me how much my high school sociology class, group projects, became political policy decades later. Simplistic reductions, when in real life even unclogging a toilet can have complictated steps, nuanced decisions, and many caveats.

I was just about to say that.

There's an amazing video by Posy documenting mouse cursor history, and even provides his own cursor pack:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg

http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/

Without reading everything there is on the subject, I'd guess it's tilted for the same reason it's tilted to the left.

Humans are tool makers and tool users. After enough time the tool becomes an extension of the body, even if the tip of the tool is mechanically or virtually detached from the hand that is controlling it. The tool maker designed this as a right-handed tool, coming into the frame in the right hand.

If the reason for the tilt direction was not this, then there would be no reason why it shouldn't tilt the other way. If you're right handed, try a right-leading cursor . It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks like a tool held in the left hand.

Does this have an effect on left-handed people? Perhaps. I'm left handed and it always felt wrong to use the mouse in my left hand. Is it because of the direction of the tilt? Who knows!

I'm left handed and have always used the mouse with my left hand.

The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange to me in any way.

I've been using computer mice in one way or another for more than 30 years and perhaps a lack of oddness comes from having so very much gotten used to it. Maybe newer left-handed mouse users would find the cursor tilt strange?

The tilt on the cursor has never seemed odd or wrong or strange to me in any way.

Not sure if people realize, but this setting is changeable, probably since the times of single-digit Windows.

since the times of single-digit Windows.

Do you mean 15 years ago with windows 7, or 30 years ago with windows 3?

Arguably, the last date of the "times of single-digit Windows" would be one day before the release of Win 10, which was on 2015-07-29.

Didn't Win 8 have fewer options for adapting the UI compared to previous versions of Windows?

I was indeed referring to Windows 3/3.1/3.11/NT 3.5. Wasn’t sure of another term that would capture that era in one word.

Decimalized? Rational number Windows?

early 90s Windows?

I don't know how far back they mean, but Im pretty sure I recall it being in XP.

Ohh now I remember! Back when we didn't have internet and I could amuse myself for hours just messing with the windows 98 settings.

I have a mouse on each side of the keyboard, so changing the mouse pointer shape was never even considered.

It might be fun to set up your system to switch between left and right-tilted cursors automatically, depending on which mouse you're using.

Also make it maintain 2 cursor positions and switch between them depending on the mouse. It would be pretty neat with multiple monitors, with focus following the (active) cursor. (Assuming you're ambidextrous, of course :))

Woah! I may be ambidextrous, but no way am I ambicursorous!

I have a mouse on each side of the keyboard

In 30yrs of IT support, this is a thing I have never seen. If I had, I'd be forever inserting into conversations about end-users. Strictly for the novelty.

Oh dear. I am left handed and I have not even considered the arrow is tilting the wrong way. Now suddenly it annoys me to no end. I need to replace my cursor ...

Just wait until you find out why scroll bars are on the right.

35-40 years ago I had to switch to left because of too much strain on the right hand. I was very happy when I found a way to mirror my cursor. Am back to right hand now though.

I think left handed users do not find it weird as it works in left to right up to down information systems. So unlike with pen they get the same benefit of operating tool sensibly.

The arrow gets replaced with a ... pin with a stylized bird in each end? ... so the arrow does not hide text anyways, when going left to right over text, as a physical pen would do.

How do you feel about writing in general, left to right, with your left hand?

For a month or two I decided to start using the mouse with my left hand just for fun, to see how ambidextrous I could be.

The "wrong"-pointed cursor annoyed me so much I had to find a utility to flip it. (On a Mac, which doesn't support custom cursors like Windows has since forever.) It seriously drove me nuts otherwise.

So it's really interesting to hear that if it was always that way for you, it doesn't bother you!

What matters is the hand you use your mouse with, I'm left handed for writing and most things but use the right hand for the mouse and it doesn't feel strange.

Why do you use your mouse with the right hand? I’m also left handed and use the mouse with my right hand, I think mostly because my parents bought a computer table with our first computer that had the spot for the mouse fixed on the right side (keyboard drawer with just enough space for the keyboard alone and below that a little extra drawer to the right to create space for the mousepad and mouse when the keyboard drawer is open). So I had to learn using the computer that way …

Seems inconsiderate from my parents, but I think they just didn’t think about that aspect.

Holding the mouse in the right hand allows for holding a pen in the left at the same time. I find that, and having the notepad next to the keyboard, to be quite useful. There's also no risk of the notepad being in the way of the mouse movements.

Yep this was like a cheat code when I had to take notes from the computer and could write and scroll simultaneously.

I also write left handed and mouse right handed. My theory is that it’s more efficient when using a QWERTY keyboard layout. The QWERTY layout is heavily left dominant in English and, I guess, many other Western European languages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#Properties: “In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand (the three most frequent letters in the English language, ETA, are all typed with the left hand)”)

So chances are that the last key hit before using the mouse is on the left side of the keyboard, as is the first key you’ll hit after using the mouse.

That makes mousing with the right hand while keeping the left hand on the home row faster than the reverse.

Not only that, but a lot of the most commonly used keyboard shortcuts are also on the left side.

I use the mouse on the right mostly because stuff like games assume you’re doing that, so keyboard controls and the like are optimized for it

Also, most computers lay the mouse that way

I could mess with this but ultimately I don’t mind too much. Maybe it explains why I’m bad at FPSes! Probably not.

This might seem odd for the youngsters having grown up with their own smartphone and laptop, but I very quickly found it annoying having to rearrange everybody's setup when using their computer. Friends, family, school, you name it...

Moving a mouse is also relatively easy compared to writing with the other hand.

The only tool I find hard to use, as a left handed, is scissors, the rest is just fine. As for the mouse, always used it with the right hand.

I'm also left handed and don't usually have a problem with scissors, unless they're bad quality scissors.

I also use the mouse with my right hand and I'm always surprised by how many left-handers actually ended up using the mouse with the right. It's quite strange. Even stranger, was a right-handed colleague who decided to use the mouse with her left.

Bad quality scissors will invariably suck for lefties because the grip of a left hand pushes the blades apart, vs. with a right it pulls them together. Scissors are my #1 gripe as a leftie too.

I use the mouse with my right because the rest of my family is right-handed so it was on the right and I just learnt by copying. I don't mind it, as I can type fairly reasonably one-handed with my left hand - much better than I could with my right - so it means I can still do short typing bursts one-handed without lifting my right hand off the mouse. When I type with two hands, I find my left covers about 60-70% of the keyboard vs. my right doing about 30-40% of the keyboard.

Funny - I’m right-handed, but my left hand also works most of the keyboard. I think it’s more because the modifier keys on the right are more natural for me to hit.

On thumb keyboards, it’s pretty similar too. My left thumb types as far to the right as U/G/B.

Even us righties need to use scissors in the left hand occasionally, such as when trimming the finger nails on the right hand. At least with nail scissors, the trick is to flip the scissors around so they point towards you rather than away. Then you're still forcing the blades together rather that apart.

A horizontally flipped (straight edge on the right) cursor does exist, I think some versions of Microsoft Word use it when editing the left margin of a document or something like this. I don't think it's a standard Windows cursor though.

Also selecting numbered lines in a text editor, on X Windows.

Linux/BSD just have to use "xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr".

OFC you can set that graphically, but this way it's universal.

Try reversing it, I’m curious

It doesn't just look wrong, it feels wrong because it looks like a tool held in the left hand.

It feels foreign only for a little bit. I'm right-handed but started developing RSI in my right wrist from using the mouse with that hand, so I've been using my left hand for over a decade now and no issues. The brain is very adaptable. For instance, we very quickly adapt to seeing the world upside down:

https://theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-res...

Without reading everything there is on the subject

Everything, or in this case the second answer on the linked page ;) I do believe you are (both) on to something though.

I mouse left-handed and wrote software for Windows to flip the mouse cursors, because it felt more natural

Dear OS makers: Please make it easier to swap the mouse buttons and also flip the cursor at the same time.

I say this because I use multiple computers and depending on when and where I am using them, sometimes want the mouse on the left. In addition to it "feeling wrong" to use a right handed cursor with my left hand (I swear it physically gives me cramps), having the cursor not match the buttons is super frustrating.

Once I got used to the direction of the cursor indicating the button configuration, it comes pretty naturally to click appropriately, even on occasions where I am using the mouse with the 'wrong' hand (because I'm using the other hand to pet a cat or drink my coffee or something).

On Windows 10/11, it's relatively easy to swap the buttons, but then I have to go into another, much more deeply buried menu (the old control panel that they seem to want to bury but can't get rid of because the Windows settings team is apparently too incompetent to put all the stuff you really need in the new configuration screens) to change the cursor to match. So then there's 5 seconds or so where the cursor doesn't match the button configuration during which my bones want to jump out of my wrist and then I need to go take a break. And for some reason, Windows 10 on my work computer seems to remember the button configuration but forget the cursor setting between reboots, so there's always a minute of confustion, there.

Also, if you're going to write some program with a cursor, DON'T OVERRIDE THE OS CURSOR WITH SOME {RIGHT|LEFT}-HANDED THING! I'm looking at dumb Acrobat Reader. The arrow in that program always points to the left even if I've flipped things in Windows, and then I get all confused when I try to click on the menus as if the mouse is in its right-handed configuration when it actually isn't.

I seem to recall some Linux distro that I used once upon a time getting this right, where there was an option to flip the cursor and the buttons at the same time. But I haven't seen that for a while.

Relatedly, why can't I have multiple cursors? There have been times when it would have been convenient to have a mouse plugged in on the left and the right and just have them both show up on the screen (pointing to the right and left, respectively, of course, with button configuration to match) so I could easily switch to whichever was more convenient at the time. Or for when $handedness-handed coworker wants to drive (just use the cursor that you normally would!). Best I found was some AutoHotKey script that didn't do quite what I wanted. Why does the OS layer need to assume exactly one cursor? Dumb if you ask me.

The real question is: Why does Windows cursor look "imperfect"?

https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...

The web page which that image is sourced from[0] and the reddit page it is in turn sourced from[1] makes a lot of hand-wavey analogies to optical balancing (which is a real phenomenon[2]) but doesn't make any compelling arguments for why they apply in this specific case.

An alternative explanation is that this intentional imperfection exists to match the unavoidable imperfection which occurred when the cursor graphic was originally drawn as tiny low resolution 1-bit pixel art. It looks correct because we're used to it being slightly wrong. And when viewed at a normal size, the difference is barely perceptible anyway.

[0] https://mspoweruser.com/why-windows-10s-asymmetrical-cursor-...

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/TIHI/comments/fwnep0/thanks_i_hate_...

[2] edited, thanks jusuhi

I'm honestly not sure any explanation is needed here. Early UX design wasn't always done with as much thought and sophistication as today's software designers (are claiming to) apply. The first Windows systems had plenty of UI blunders that make the cursor thing look insignificant by comparison, and I can promise you they weren't all about "visual balance" or similar. Lots of them have carried over to later versions.

Early UX design wasn't always done with as much thought and sophistication as today's software designers (are claiming to) apply.

Oh, but it was. Here's Apple HIG from 1987 listing extensive bibliography on the subject: https://x.com/andy_matuschak/status/1447409175596699652 (here's the full PDF: https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter...)

Modern "designers" apply as much thought and care as a hungry goldfish at feeding time

I think the point here is

wasn't always done with as much thought

While Apple cared a lot about perfecting UX, Microsoft had other priorities.

What's with this myth that Microsoft never cared about UI/UX design? It's simply not true. They're especially not any better at it now than in the 90s and 00s. Modern designers don't put even a fraction of research into UI design than what Microsoft used to do.

Windows 3.1 had a beautiful revolutionary design. I remember closely examining all the buttons and icons when I first saw it.

Making things intuitive and easily usable was absolutely a priority of Microsoft back then, and they put a lot more thought in that than most modern "UX" design.

Making things pretty wasn't a priority for Microsoft the same way it was for Apple. But I wouldn't call that UX.

Microsoft did a lot of user and interface research. It wasn't as streamlined as Apple's, but it's incorrect to say that they didn't give it much thought.

I don't have a link to OS-level considerations, but here's a series of articles on how MS Office's original ribbon came to be: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...

Or here: https://x.com/andy_matuschak/status/1447710247712280578

there's a (pre-release) 1985 HIG that's quite different. It includes e.g. case studies (useful!), and an extended discussion of Jung's theories of intuition and how they should influence your designs (!!)

The most modern "designers" read is the labels on grocery store items.

UX may not have been as big back then but there’s nooo way no one noticed it being uneven if there was any designer involved. I just always assumed it was an artist’s style choice.

I'd assume it was a deliberate choice because I'd think it'd be easier to implement a graphic with straight lines than with lines just off enough to be noticeable.

I think the apparent contradictions here can be explained quite easily: Apple cared about design, and Microsoft did not.

Looking back from an era in which Apple's sensibility has prevailed, it's quite hard to explain the extent to which Microsoft, at least until the late '90s, really didn't care whether their software looked good. They genuinely didn't see it as important.

Well, Microsoft did hire Susan Kare to design the Windows 3 icons. Kare previously and famously did a lot of early Macintosh GUI design work for Apple. But while Apple saw GUI design as a holistic effort, at Microsoft, the good stuff (e.g. Kare's icons) and the bad stuff (e.g. the sloppily designed mouse cursor) just went hand in hand. Which adds to your point.

I always thought it is obvious - it was done so that it will be well visible on predictable background patterns. Otherwise (if it would be a clean vertical, horizontal, 45 degree design) it would easily "hide" in plain sight, sticking to grids, window borders. Blend in too easily.

Phenomenon. That's the singular form.

The article from Surur Davids is wrong. Windows cursor have an outline, the one from Mac don't.

To avoid getting sued for copying Apple IP? You know Apple like to patent shapes, like rectangles with rounded corners; ask Samsung.

This is tired and uninformed, please just let it die.

Apple was issued a design patent which is a real, common thing and is highly specific. It isn’t just patenting a roundrect and calling it a day.

This was a joke. I posted it because I thought it was funny, obviously certain apple fanboys are insulted by any criticism of apple even in joke form.

I didn’t know it’s a joke. I’ve heard about Samsung vs Apple long ago, but never learned how it resolved or if it was about just rounded corners. Probably because of ubiquitous and unmarked jokes like this one, combined with no research on my side. I’m not insulted, but I don’t get why people do that. It’s not far from trolls changing opinions on politics or society standards, just less harmful.

I was replying with a flippant joke to what I took to be a flippant remark/joke about the windows pointer not being "perfect" like Apple's pointer supposedly is.

The fact the post I replied to garnered no similar criticism to my flippant remark shows more about the culture on HN than anything else. That seemingly being: critise everything but Apple, Apple is off limits unless you're hear to fawn over them. This is currently playing out on my karma.

I've made similar flippant remarks/jokes about Google, Microsoft, Meta with no repucussions but god forbid I level some critism at apple!

I wouldn't stress it. Your karma's not going to disappear because a few people can't take (or didn't like, or didn't get) your joke :-)

Haha, yeah I mentioned it more out of interest. My karma has fluctuated between ±10 since my initial comment. Currently about where I started. I genuinely find the phenomenon interesting, I've never really understood the blind loyalty apple endears in its fans.

It wasn’t funny, the response was informative, and throwing around the term “fanboy’ is juvenile.

It was pretty funny and the fact you are getting offended just proves their point even more imo.

The trouble with text is that it often does not have implied intent. There is no sarcasm font. And when people respond with “can’t you take a joke?” It comes off as dismissive at best, and trolling at worst. Not to mention that “it was just a joke” feels like a hail-Mary attempt to justify a comment that was poorly received.

I dunno, looks like a rounded rectangle to me [1]

Besides, if Apple was allowed to patent rounded rectangles more, they absolutely would.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/7/3614506/apple-patents-rec...

Design patents, except for highly specific names and logos, shouldn't be a thing.

Luckily the LEGO case has already shown that any design patent that even slightly affects functionality is automatically invalid.

There was no patent about rounded rectangles. Please stop spreading fake news; News are sensationalized by journalists to the point the reader has an impression they said something that journalists didn’t; Do not repeat them.

It’s just that Samsung was the Concordski of the Concorde, it was copying Apple’s designs to the letter, from the unboxing experience to the charger even to the home button. It was an obvious copyright infringement.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/apples-case-that...

I think you are right in substance, but from memory the radius of the corners of the copy phones did form part of the court case.

Yes. It formed a part of the case. The rounded corners part was a part of the whole design package discussed.

I didn't follow the lawsuit but i remember seeing a large cardboard model of a samsung phone in a store back then; it wasn't similar to whatever Apple was peddling at the time, it was identical. At least from like 5 m.

So they may have had a point in suing.

The current high-resolution cursor seems like a scaled-up version of the original cursor. Perhaps it's that way for compatibility reason since there are tons of monitors using 100% scaling.

At larger scale factors, Windows renders the cursor from an SVG source. It's not clear if there would be a compatibility issue with straightening the arrow image at larger scales since it uses a hardcoded .cur image at small sizes.

Additionally, Windows 10/11 go to some extent to hide cursor scaling from applications. Win32 GDI/USER calls only see the base 32x32 arrow cursor and only DXGI Output Duplication (screen capture API) can see the real cursor. This causes other problems, though, such as various bugs and inconsistencies with custom cursor images.

Because Windows is made with poor attention to details and in a tasteless manner. For instance, when Windows XP came out, I remember clearly how some stock icons weren't properly aligned on the same baseline (it was corrected in some later SP).

Fascinating! Computers didn’t exist before Windows or Windows XP!

I saw this somewhere the other day - the explanation I saw there was that it makes the cursor seem more balanced

I was looking at both of them for probably a little too long, and I can't see it.

a recurring peeve of mine is small tooltips becoming unreadable underneath the cursor which blocks them from being read... then you move the cursor away the tooltip disappears from view... this could actually be fixed at some point in the future

other operating systems are available.

Time for one of my favourite Youtube videos, by Posy (Michiel de Boer.) 'Mouse cursor history (and why I made my own).'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg

It runs through the history of mouse cursors, as well as problems with some of the standard ones, and shows, among other things, historical cursors which were straight and not tilted.

It is one of those amazing videos that make the internet worthwhile, is short, and is by the author of Posy's Cursor Pack, http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/

Seems like this should be in a list somewhere with that big sized keyboard history book that was on HN last week?

Oh, dang, I can't believe I missed that. Would've loved to get a copy of it. It looks amazing.

I'm not sure this is accurate. He shows the IIGS cursor as the Lisa "Color mode" cursor, for one thing.

He never mentions the NeXT environment, DPS and differences in DPI, their own black and white arrow cursor, and how that cursor actually came into Mac OS X, not the one from System 1 and onward.

Hmm.

It was really interesting and well-made, thanks for sharing!

Great video and great link.

I use his set on Windows (It looks awesome) and on Ubuntu, the Linux port from here:

https://github.com/simtrami/posy-improved-cursor-linux

Xerox Park and display reasons aside, I think that the 2nd answer, with the picture of the hand is the best answer apart from historical and technical reasons.

The "best answer" perhaps from the POV of your own intuition. But the question is about a historical fact, and those don't work that way.

Is this a legacy thing or does a tilted cursor serves a purpose?

It's not just a question of historical fact. There's where it originated from. Then there are the documented reasons they first did it that way. Then the undocumented but plausible reasons it started that way. Then there are the reasons it has stayed this way. Those reasons aren't facts, they're counterfactuals.

Implicit in asking why the mouse cursor is like this is asking why it isn't a different way. If there was a better enough cursor, it would have won out. So all of its reasons of functionality, even the ones the inventor didn't think of or didn't matter historically, are part of why it is the way it is today.

I guess first is the reason why it's initially and second is why it stay that way.

For unrelated reasons it got me thinking of Mark Zuckerberg telling Joe Rogan how they left only the hand (and not the whole arm) in their VR, as it was enough.

Random thought.

I have no idea, but a wild guess is that with old hardware the "hot" pixel that could trigger the collision interrupt was fixed to the upper left corner of the hardware sprite.

EDIT: Another thought that crossed my mind is that with very lo-res screens a corner is the only way to get a well defined and sharp (yet fairly wide) arrowhead. The trade-off would be the shaft being pixelated, but the tip is more important.

That was debunked 10 years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7253841

Did early workstations support hardware cursors?

If you'd actually read wherever the link is going then you could get an idea instead of just speculating wildly.

Because it mimics the fountain pen? That’s how you hold it when you write with one (the cursor being the virtual tip)

https://youtu.be/U9mWKwXfF6s?t=155s

If this is the case, should someone using a left handed mouse have a cursor that tilts the opposite way?

Don't we? I distinctly recall that when I was using a left-handed mouse on WinNT 4 in the nineties, the mouse pointer was reversed? Whether that was the original cursor or just someone at IT being a leftie and installing a custom cursor, though, I have no idea.

I later found it much better for me to simply use my right hand for mousing about, leaving my left hand free for taking notes.

Thanks for the link! As a fountain pen addict, I found the video captivating. I was curious, though, as to why the person was printing, not writing. Sad.

One compelling reason is so that when pointing at something with the cursor, it doesn't block the thing you're pointing at. If the cursor was mirrored or even centered, hovering over a button would obscure some of the button. This assumes you approach from the bottom right though, which may be in turn because of the cursor's shape-- but I think reading direction is a stronger theory for why you'd want to approach from the bottom right.

This was my first reaction as well, but checking how I actually use a mouse I don't think it makes sense. Curious if it's jut me though.

For starters for normal desktop usage like >95% of the time the thing I want to click on isn't under the mouse yet so it doesn't obscure anything. Instead I move the mouse to it and by the time the mouse is there I don't care what is under it anymore because the decision to click it was made already.

Second when the mouse is over something I need to be able to read it seems I tend to move the mouse away (even when it's over text and turns into a straight cursor). The reason being that no matter what cursor is used its lines are typically wider and higher than the lines in rendered characters underneath so always obscures something. In other words: even if the cursor weren't tilted it would still obscure the same amount of surface, but just in a slightly different location. And that's really only slightly so for practical use won't matter.

Wrt where something is approached from: that depends on where the cursr is and where the target is. It would be really interesting to put this in a heatmap from daily usage, but I quickly checked some of the things I access often, like in my bottom taskbar and browser tab bar at the top, and since the things clicked often are both left and right of the screen and my cursor can be seeminlgy anywhere there might still be one approach direction used more but only by some marging.

Lastly most software I checked where obsucring could actually matter (e.g. CAD) uses custom cursors like 1 pixel wide crosses etc, not something tilted.

This might be true today but on the lower resolution screens of the 80s, the mouse pointer was relatively bigger than it is today.

So the more reason to move it away if it's over things which matter?

I'd like to add to all of the reasons I find valid (not obscuring what one is pointing at, mimicking pointing with a finger) that everything displayed on the screen is pretty much perpendicular to the x or y axis. The tilted cursor thus sticks out among the rest of the content.

As an aside, as a typical Amiga quirk, the early Amiga mouse cursor was tilted in a 45° angle to the x axis, contrary to all the other popular GUIs with more acute angles for the cursor. And there was a built-in tool for creating custom mouse cursors, which I personally loved. See for example http://toastytech.com/guis/amiga12.html

I'd think that the original Amiga arrow pointer could have got its stubby style because hardware sprite could only be in low resolution and 2:1-stepped lines did not look very good.

The style was changed to a sharper point in Amiga OS 2.0 but it was still slanted 45°. First on the Amiga 1200/4000 with AGA could you get a high-resolution mouse pointer.

In Workbench 2.0+ it was slanted 45° with the two sides at 30° and 60°, it was red with a hint of 3D (light at the top-right, dark bottom-left) and was beautiful! It stood out on whatever background.

Including setting the hot spot.

Similar to the Macintosh mouse pointer the click point was not at (0,0) but at (1,1) (the orange point in the skin colored area in the editor on the linked page).

Top answer [1] (when I'm looking, others seems to refer to other top answers) says that the original cursor _was_ straight, and links to an image, which 404's [2].

Anyone have a working link?

[1] https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/52338

[2] http://origin.arstechnica.com/images/gui/4-NLSgui.jpg

https://web.archive.org/web/20190628045230/http://origin.ars...

Xerox parc again. I have the feeling everything we have today was invented in this place. How was it possible that it was so successful and influencial?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14108797

look at your right hand right now. how is the mouse oriented? I would be $1000 it's a little to the left, just like your cursor!

You are going to owe left-handed people a lot of money. :)

Were the first mouse pointers graphical?

I remember using a black rectangle as a mouse pointer in console based applications - it was literally one character of the console with inverted colors.

Were the first mouse pointers graphical?

Yes. Set aside a few hours to watch ‘The Mother of all Demos’.

I was just going through my regular Sunday morning routine when I opened hn and realized I'm the second most upvoted answer to this question.

That was 10 years ago.

Is it right? Probably not.

Did I answer instinctively? Yes.

Is it a problem to keep it there? I don't think so, there are plenty of other explanations in the same page.

Am I providing further evidence? No.

Please refer to https://xkcd.com/386/

I guess the obsession to fix something that's wrong on the internet only applies to mistakes by other people, not one's own mistakes. Cuz really, it's the responsibility of other people to fix my mistakes.

Most SO answers were non-answers or word salads. Thankfully one of you added an answer explaining that the cursor is already straight given that it must be visible from the graphics coordinate origin (upper left) and is 45 degrees wide.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/149837/45927

Bart Gijssens's answer is neither of those things, and gives an explanation, including the historical rationale, and links to citations.

> It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor.

Ockham's Razor. It really is that simple. Having had to do a lot of "dot art," in The Days of Yore, I understand perfectly, why this choice was made. Some systems did an "unfilled" arrow, with just the outer barbs. Same angle of the shaft, but the barbs were at 90 degrees. Leaning left was chosen, because of the prevalence of righties. The "unfilled" arrow was easier to confuse with the background.

I suspect that many of today's programmers would be absolutely aghast, at the resolution of our screens, back then.

ResEdit FTW!

Yup. The "stairs" of a 45° angle just looked visually smoother than an up-2-over-1 line which looked a bit jaggier. Not an earth-shattering difference, but a difference nonetheless.

My understanding is that before mouse pointer there was a light pen aka light gun pointer. It was used perpendicularly to the screen, literally pointing at the desired location.

Then, when implementing a more 'remote' on-screen pointer, the notion of pointing perpendicularly at the site was best projected by a tilted 2D marker.

Think of the mouse pointer kinda sticking out of the screen as a dart.

I can't imagine the arm strain the users of the light pen had to endure back in time ... Though the workflow was probably still more keyboard-bound.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

Another reason is likely clipping. When drawing the cursor you have to prevent pixels from being drawn off screen to the right or bottom of the screen. If the cursor were symmetric, you would have to watch out for the left edge of the screen as well.

I agree with all the reasons mentioned ranging from calculating the vertex position - sharp tip of the arrow (x, y) to the pixel issue (low resolution on older machines) to the right-hand pointing direction.

For all practical purposes, I observed 2 other things.

The first is that English is written left to write. If you ever had the experience of using a different language that starts from right to left, this same arrow feels weird.

And the second is a little activity experience.

1. Arrange the 4 files in a square box, 2 up 2 down

2. Notice that as soon as the sharp point of the arrow touches any file boundary, the arrow can select the file by a pixel difference that you can't with a straight arrow (ease of use)

3. It also takes a constant number of operations (best case scenario) compared to the straight arrow where the algorithm has to decide based on the percentage of how much of the straight arrow shape hovers over another file to select

I'm surprised nobody has posited an "obscurity" rationale.

When the majority of your information is vertical/horizontal (such as text, window elements, etc), an angled cursor makes it easier to interpolate what's underneath. And the arrow shape keeps the bulk of the icon out of the way of your point of interest (compared to, for example, a reticle - although I expect we'd adapt just fine).

It's funny how much of this stuff comes down to just "because that's how someone did it first". I see this mirrored in my own work, where so many arbitrary decisions are maintained for no reason other than that they were chosen at the outset. Nice to see that applies to basically everything.

As someone who played with the DOS text mode fonts a little, I never bothered with that question, assuming left tilt of the arrow was a way to make it visually bigger / more visible

There's ... a lot of dubious and unsourced or poorly sourced answers there.

The "saves a calculation" answer sounds like complete horseshit. Any machine fast enough to update a mouse cursor every time the mouse moves could have afforded two additional subtractions on a click event.

"When the XEROX PARC machine was built, the cursor changed into a tilted arrow. It was found that, given the low resolution of the screens in those days, drawing a straight line (left edge of arrow) and a line at a 45 degree angle (right edge of arrow) was easier to do and more recognizable than the straight cursor."

Well there ya go right there. The left side of the arrowhead is a nice clean straight line, and the right side of the arrowhead is as close as possible to 45 degrees, cutting down its "jaggedness".

Anyone struggling with the answer didn't grow up on 640x480 resolution.

When you have so few pixels, you really want to be able to use the exact pixel you intend.

Although the linked page was highly entertaining, I suspect (and this is pure speculation) that the real answer is that, to the people who had to make the original decisions back in the 70s and early 80s, the current design “looked better”.

For subsequent implementations it is likely mostly inertia.

Again this is all speculation but it doesn’t really have to be any more complex than that.

As a side note in the early 80s as a teenager I wanted to write a space game on my Apple //e computer that had a wedge shaped spacecraft like a star destroyer or the spacecraft from Asteroids. I spent many many hours hand drawing the bitmaps for each size and rotation. The shapes always looked a little jagged, except in the +/- 45 degree orientations.

I suppose it makes more sense for left to right text interfaces?

I'm amazed none of the answers are pointing out that a straight cursor is completely non-naturalistic. A cursor tilted to the left resembles an arrow being held in the right hand and being used to point at something.

For a better deep dive into mouse cursors with more information, there's Posy's "Mouse Cursor History (and why I made my own)":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg

It also shows how absolutely horrid Windows' cursor designs are. They always were. I still remember making my own sets back in the early 2000s when DeviantArt was the home of desktop customization.

The point of a pointer is that it should stand off against the things it points at.

A usual GUI for the most part has straight edges and certain symmetries. A cursor that is similarly symmetric will blend in more easily, and get visually lost.

Which way it tilts is secondary, the irregularity of the tilt itself against the rest of the interface is key.

I love Izhaki's visual explanation.

I feel the need to immediately change to an upward pointing cursor to honour Douglas Engelbart.

(2014)

None of the Stack Overflow answers mention Alan Kay, who created the angled mouse cursor at PARC. When asked about this¹, he responded:

"The Parc mouse cursor appearance was done (actually by me) because in a 16x16 grid of one-bit pixels (what the Alto at Parc used for a cursor) this gives you a nice arrowhead if you have one side of the arrow vertical and the other angled (along with other things there, I designed and made many of the initial bitmap fonts). Then it stuck, as so many things in computing do."

¹ https://jameshk.com/mouse-cursor

My theory. When hovering or clicking on an icon more of the icon is visible with a tilted arrow.