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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
The difference is that (subjectively) there used to be less of this on HN. The herd moves much more aggressively now rather than granting for debate. The generational differences are much more pronounced; the politics not a match of Democrat vs. Republican, but something equally vindictive. It isn’t particularly pleasant, but what are the alternatives?
It's really a great strength of human species. We may not exceed animals in any other quality, except for persistence hunting, but we are exceptional at copying the behavior of other individuals of our species without considering whether it's sensible or not. Even monkeys don't do this as much as humans.
It's no surprise that people who lack expertise will downvote and actual expert. I see it happen every day when people try to be the smartest person in the meeting or just simply cannot allow anyone to think they are wrong.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
As I understand it the cursor angles are mostly a function of cursors originally being pixel art. In pixel art you need nice integer ratios to your angles or the line starts looking wobbly.
If you then design your cursor to be nice and pointy so it doesn't obscure the thing you're trying to click too much you end up with two angles where if you bisect them you're no longer at an integer ratio angle. So some fudging for the cursor tail is required.
Of course these days cursors are generally high resolution vector art, so none of the integer ratio angle concerns apply, but I assume most vector cursors originally got traced from their pixel predecessors.
This is all from memory and I was quite young back when any of this was relevant, so caveat emptor.
> 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.
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.
It drives me up the wall! Permit me a digression: so much has been written about the early FPS era, but discussions of rocket jumping often skip straight to Quake and omit Rise of the Triad, despite rocket jumping being necessary to complete the game! ROTT's shareware release was the same day as Marathon, another game that does come up in these discussions.
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?
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 ...
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!
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.
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.
Also nobody is asking why it's pointed up, but it's the same reason. Your hand is usually below your eye-level.
From a theoretical point of view, the most intuitive cursor would be a crosshair, but I've tried that and don't like it.
> 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
X11 on Linux at least is perfectly happy to let you have multiple pointer. Last time I tried, most programs handled it reasonably, a few (*cough* Chrome *cough*) went nuts.
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."
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
Readit News
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:
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!
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.
So people can state absolute absurdities and have people agree.
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).
> 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.
It's really a great strength of human species. We may not exceed animals in any other quality, except for persistence hunting, but we are exceptional at copying the behavior of other individuals of our species without considering whether it's sensible or not. Even monkeys don't do this as much as humans.
It's no surprise that people who lack expertise will downvote and actual expert. I see it happen every day when people try to be the smartest person in the meeting or just simply cannot allow anyone to think they are wrong.
Sometimes that is because experts just say "I am an expert so trust me" without proper explanations or links to explanations or evidence.
I mean just look to politics, that already explains enough!
in my experience thats true, its less familiar
Dead Comment
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.
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.
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?
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/
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”.
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.
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.
If you then design your cursor to be nice and pointy so it doesn't obscure the thing you're trying to click too much you end up with two angles where if you bisect them you're no longer at an integer ratio angle. So some fudging for the cursor tail is required.
Of course these days cursors are generally high resolution vector art, so none of the integer ratio angle concerns apply, but I assume most vector cursors originally got traced from their pixel predecessors.
This is all from memory and I was quite young back when any of this was relevant, so caveat emptor.
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.
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!
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?
Not sure if people realize, but this setting is changeable, probably since the times of single-digit Windows.
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!
Seems inconsiderate from my parents, but I think they just didn’t think about that aspect.
Everything, or in this case the second answer on the linked page ;) I do believe you are (both) on to something though.
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...
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.
OFC you can set that graphically, but this way it's universal.
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 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
https://archives.loomcom.com/contraltojs/
and follow the instructions under "Running Smalltalk 76".
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/03/faceboo...
giving the appearance that the mouse is tilted.
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/
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.
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
https://mspoweruser.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/windows-c...
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
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.
Dead Comment
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
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.
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).
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.
https://youtu.be/U9mWKwXfF6s?t=155s
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.