Cursor animations and other visual effects

[valpackett]

https://github.com/neovide/neovide has really cool cursor effects, would be nice to have them here.

There's also various silly fun stuff around like power mode :D

[wez]

While I'm not personally sold on the warping cursor effect in neovide (the motion feels excessive and distracting to me, but I know this is subjective!), I have been thinking about eg: cursor animation.

Since wezterm supports frame scheduling for animated gifs/pngs, it's not a huge stretch to replace the currently separate logic that manages what are effectively frames for cursor blinking and consolidate it with the more general image frame management.

In other words, it wouldn't be terribly difficult to support using animated gifs for the text cursor instead of the current static textures.
The main reason I didn't jump on this already is that I don't know of a supply of gifs that are really usable for the cursor to make a great feature demo!
https://github.com/liamg/darktile does something like this, but using a static duck image.

The basic warp/stretch effect in neovide is probably not too difficult to replicate if wezterm could remember the prior cursor position and then interpolate the new coordinates for the quad when it notices a change, but we don't currently have a thing to manage that kind of animation: only timing for switching to a new frame, so the GUI layer would need to grow something to help with that, and in turn, that might be sufficient to use for some of the particle effects on the cursor trail.

[qerplunk]

Something like darktile's static image as a cursor is exactly what I was looking for.

However, if this were to be implemented, would there be a way to only use the image on, for example, normal mode in vim, and keep the default line for insert mode?

[wez]

I'm going to use #1432 to track this as an issue rather than a discussion, as those cross-link a bit better when referenced by number. I've sketched out some thoughts on where to go for the main animation bits themselves, but not put down any thoughts about eg: warping effects.

[scy]

I totally understand that the cursor warping can feel “excessive and distracting”, but when I first saw it in Neovide, I thought “wow, that’s really helpful!”. Sure, Neovide’s particle effects are just for showing off, but a warping cursor can be an accessibility feature, just like smooth scrolling. It enables you to better track where the cursor is moving to, e.g. when jumping between tmux windows, or after a Ctrl-O in Vim.

On the other hand, I don’t care at all for having a Darktile-style duck image as my cursor. ;)

[vvtommy]

Hahaha, I knew someone would bring this up.
What I mean is...that duck cursor thing.

[Shock9616]

Just indicating interest in this as well! Neovide-like animations would be really nice for tracking large cursor movements