I fancy putting together a config that relies heavily on mouse gestures rather than menus. It’s probably totally impractical, but it sounds like fun to do, even if I don’t much use it. One of the things I would like is to have the mouse pointer leave a glowing trail behind it when it’s in “stroke mode” which gradually fades away. Anyone who’s played Arx Fatalis will know what I mean.
Anyway, I don’t think for a minute that FVWM will handle this direct, and I’m quite prepared, if need be, to write my own C program to make it work. What I want to know is anyone knows of a program that either does what I need here, or does something similar that I can hack on.
I mean, people who know me already think I try to make it look like magic when I operate a keyboard and mouse. I just thought it would be nice if they could see what it was like when I really did try.
You know, just so they have a basis for comparison
Doing it yourself would mean you’d have to grab the pointer at every opportunity, and redraw the cursor each time in a series of very small steps – thus there’s an overhead in doing so, and it would make the CPU go crazy.
How would you handle things like WarpToWindow, and the like?
That said, I looked into mouse trails the other week, and found a few things:
Mmm… I figure it should be no harder on the CPU than those annoying little things (like oneko - couldn’t bring the name to mind) that follow the mouse pointer. Then again a lot of them can get away with one event in 10 or 100 I suppose.
It’s only going to activate on mouse strokes, which will only activate when you hold down Modifier Three or some such. So if the trail is active, nothing else should be happening, GUI wise. Once the command is executed, the trail can turn off.
Of course, if something on a different desk steals the focus in mid trail, things may get interesting.
Thank you. That looks like just the sort of thing I had in mind.
