"Mouse Jump" for ultra-wide monitors

[mikeclayton]

Description of the new feature / enhancement

First off, apologies if similar functionality is already in PowerToys somewhere - I looked but couldn't see anything...

The proposed feature (working title FancyMouse or "Mouse Jump") would register a Windows HotKey combination that, when activated, displays a window at the current mouse location with a clickable thumbnail screenshot of the entire desktop - when it's clicked the mouse pointer is moved to the location clicked in the thumbnail.

Background: I started using an ultrawide 5120x1440 external monitor with my laptop recently and got fed up with constantly swiping the physical mouse side-to-side across my desk to move the pointer from one side of the screen to the other, so I wrote a POC of this functionality that I use all the time now - see video below:

FancyMouse.mp4

and here's an animation that shows it in more detail:

I've customised my Logitech mouse software to assign the HotKey combination to a spare thumb button on my mouse, so now I can jump the pointer anywhere on my desktop with 2 button clicks - one to activate the hotkey and one to click the thumbnail and jump the pointer.

I Imagine integrating the concept into PowerToys would require a ground-up rewrite of the feature, but I've found my POC so useful (without wanting to sound like I'm blowing my own trumpet :-)) that I wanted to offer the idea up for consideration.

Happy to share the POC repo if it sounds useful to play with to try the proposed feature out...

Scenario when this would be used?

This feature would be most useful for any workstation setup that has an ultrawide monitor, or multiple monitors configured in a large screen estate, but could be used on any setup to move the mouse quickly to specific desktop locations.

Traditionally, moving across a large screen estate requires repeated "swiping" of the physical mouse - moving it to the edge of its available bounds, lifting it and moving back to the opposite bound repeatedly until the pointer has moved to the desired location. This is slow, and it's often hard to track the mouse without losing it on the screen.

The proposed FancyMouse / "Mouse Jump" feature allows the pointer to be moved anywhere on the desktop with a couple of mouse clicks very quickly with high precision and without losing its resting position.

Supporting information

Personal experience of using my POC tool leads me to believe this would improve the user experience on large screen setups - I have it running in the background permanently and although it took a while to learn the muscle memory on the spare mouse button, I use it for most large mouse moves now without even thinking.

There are numerous tools and utilities, support forum questions, etc that cover requirements like wanting to "snap" the mouse to a specific application or a specific monitor to reduce the amount of time and effort required to "swipe" the mouse to the desired location, so there's a demand for this type of feature in general.

Showing a thumbnail of the entire desktop allows the user to move the pointer a very small amount across the thumbnail to cover scenarios like "snap to application" and "snap to monitor" as well as move the pointer to arbitrary locations on the desktop with good accuracy.

[crutkas]

Neat, @mikeclayton i sent you an email.

[mikeclayton]

@crutkas - replied :-)

[imthenachoman]

This. Is. Awesome!

[crutkas]

xref #984

[imthenachoman]

Is it possible to set the size of the jump window? For me, it's still pretty large and still requires a lot of mouse movement.

[crutkas]

Great feature request!

[crutkas]

added in 0.68