Been reminded a couple of times recently that I seem to be the only person who refuses to say 'mouse cursor'. I call it the mouse pointer, to distinguish it from the 'cursor' which is the block or line or caret in your terminal or text-editing environment that shows where your next keyboard input will go.
If you think 'cursor' is the mouse pointer, what's the other thing called?
And if you say 'cursor' for both, what's your usual strategy when you need to clarify?
@simontatham what's wrong with having multiple cursors assigned to multiple input devices? If I had a way to have my mouse and laptop touchpad each hve their own cursor, I'd probably find an use for that (on the Atari ST you could play Lemmings in multiplayer mode this way)
@pulkomandy reminds me that one of my fantasies is a dual-control GUI for pair programming. One screen (or set of them); two keyboards, two mice, two mouse pointers, and two independent notions of where the input focus is. My mouse moves my pointer which selects a window for my keyboard to type in; yours likewise.
Then you can code in an editor while I pull up relevant docs web pages in a browser, and periodically, we can drag windows to the other side of the display and switch roles.
@goatsarah certainly the Amiga was where I first had a need to refer to the mouse pointer at all, and I'm pretty sure that was what it was called there. So I'd believe it!
@JigsawPieces mmm, someone else in this thread has mentioned "text cursor" too.
I think that's one of my questions answered. I'd imagined that "keyboard cursor" would be the natural way to disambiguate, but I agree "text cursor" is better. Both more likely to be accurate (you might be using text input methods other than a keyboard), and shorter!
@rogerlipscombe yes, I've encountered 'caret' in the names of Win32 API functions. I haven't really seen it used much in text. As far as I'm concerned it's a bad term because it's almost never actually a ^ shape!
Speaking of APIs, the X11 protocol is indecisive about its terminology for the mouse pointer: it has GrabPointer and WarpPointer requests, but a CURSOR data type. Perhaps that means it thinks 'pointer' is the location, and 'cursor' is the appearance?
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