It's an over-the-top animation of a terminal cursor moving from position to position, helps notice where it moved to. I thought it'll be something about mouse cursor animations. I could see myself using this if a) I was using more TUI apps and b) it'd be toned down quite a bit.
14 year-old me set up Linux Mint with this LSD Conky display for my grandmother. I said something like "Well technically it's LSD but it looks cool so don't worry about it".
in hindsight, I do regret not yet being able to supply my <3 grandma with a small dose, might have condoled her senseless fury (dementia rage or so).. RIP
I've not heard of tattoy but I'm glad I ran across it. Most of its usage is not to my taste, but it appears to scratch an itch I've had for some time. I've been chewing on this idea for a... terminal emulator? shell? editor plugin?... something where you could annotate an error message with something like:
> This is fixed in the next release, nothing to see here
or
> I think think one is actually a problem, see issue 1657
And then your coworkers could view the logs in some way (special terminal emulator? piped through some kind of filter? idk) and your annotations would appear in a column next to the logs, perhaps with some background coloring to indicate which annotation goes with which log message. This way you don't all duplicate the effort of deciding whether this particular error is worth worrying about--instead you'd leave notes right there on the error (anchored via context triggered piecewise hashes).
The tattoy protocol seems like it be a good way to apply the highlighting on the logs whenever one that has a matching annotation appears on screen (https://tattoy.sh/docs/plugins/).
That would actually be cool. We have a couple issue patterns with the interface between front and backend that leads to our frontend guys always misinterpreting the reason their API call are failing. Wound be cool to annotate “this error message is usually caused by another error message in <this controller>. Please check for this before assuming…”
It's part of a bigger vision, a sort of general-purpose digital spraypaint, where you don't need write access to the data in order to annotate it and we use patterns in the data itself to index the annotations such that you can direct any bitstream into the app and ask:
> do any of my peers have annotations on any of this?
But I think the way to get there is to make a variety of purpose built apps which all follow the same pattern, and I figure annotations on logs is one of the first ones I'll do. It has been slow going though, holidays and weekends, so it'll be a while.
I'm the creator of Tattoy, so thanks. A significant part of the motivation for the project is that it's fun, like a "toy", as the name suggests. I do use it everyday, but only for one serious usecase, to allow my Twitch chatters to visually interact with my terminal by sending emotes to it. I'm not personally into the animated cursors, they were just easy to implement because I'd already built out support for Ghostty's background shaders.
But, if you want a truly serious usecase, then my pipe dream is that Tattoy becomes the "XWayland" for an entirely new protocol for terminals that explores moving on from ANSI codes, the terminfo database and so on. I wrote a blog post about this idea: https://tattoy.sh/news/an-end-to-terminal-ansi-codes
Looks very nice and fun, and potentially very useful. I was going to say I'd prefer a gradient effect to emulate motion blur, but stepping through the video I see you've already implemented something like that.
However, when making large moves, it seems a bit disorienting and the gradient effect seems very subtle in the video. Perhaps make the effect depend on distance, like actual motion blur would?
I was also thinking about having a color shift when moving up vs moving down, not sure about that one but certainly something I'd play with.
I think this is something that is quite actively being explored in the Ghostty community. And Tattoy automatically benefits from that because it supports the very same cursor shaders. You could check out the Ghostty Discord if you're interested. And of course you can experiment with your own cursor shaders, they follow the same syntax as Shader Toy: https://tattoy.sh/docs/shaders
This looks cool. I am a bit off topic here. But my only fear is this entices some people to make it the default in terminals over time.
Like all moderne UIs now have animations, ranging from very slow to barely fast enough for my personal perception.
And it becomes increasingly hard to disable those animations. They creep up absolutely everywhere. And they drive me crazy. I want my computer to act instantaneously. Redraw within 8ms.
Almost all animations are also impossible to abort or skip. Worse plenty will animate concurrently. So you might be jumping around on a webpage faster than the animation, which then jumps you back to then slowly animate.
My life on this planet is finite. A computer isstupidly fast. Why waste my precious lifetime? How many minute of life do developers of animations steal from people?
I do understand that I process visual stimulus faster than most people. Making me an outlier. Modern interfaces are devoided of identifiable buttons and all look like a smear of emptiness with a few dollops of text and burger icons to interact with. Making it hard to notice what changed between two actions. Maybe increasing the need for animations to help people follow
On Mac, I recently mistakenly held Shift (or some other key combo?), before hitting Space to open QuickLook as I was gonna select a few image files.
It proceeded to open quicklook with an incredibly slow >5s animation, very annoying :S
I assumed this meant mouse cursors, so I was confused why the pointer didn’t move in the same video. Would have been better just to turn it off for the recording.
With stereo-spacial transformation, so the sounds "direction" and "distance" match my own physical dynamic orientation relative to the cursor's motion on the screen.
And, the ability to open a small window, which gives me the cursor's visual point-of-view, as it zooms through the graphics on the screen.
Also, each traversed character should get "hot" as the curser goes over it, indicated with a stable glow for a quarter of a second, followed by an exponential fade over another second.
I think we can all agree that when in flow, functional distractions need to work harder, be more immersive, to be effective.
I installed it with homebrew but I dont see this shader tracer, I even see the blue pixel top right. Ive read the docs but it doesnt seem to explain if I need to do anything further which means it must be my already customised iterm which is the issue. Ill see if I can sort it.
The creator here, sounds like I need to improve the docs. Did you set `enabled = true` in the `[animated_cursors]` section of the config? If so, then this could be bug, and I'd be very grateful for a report in the repo's issues: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy
tbh im not sure what Im doing wrong, I already have a highly customised iterm window and have spent a hour with chatgpt trying to troubleshoot this to no avail... must just be my setup for some reason. I will let you know if I figure it out - thanks
Oh! You weren't missing anything, the automated Homebrew builds have been giving false positive successes since v0.1.3. I've updated it to v0.1.7 now. Thank you for mentioning this.
Yes, happens occasionally. I just wiggle it left/right or up/down so I can see where it is. No big deal. But put of curiosity I might still try that one day, with a more subtle effect though. ;)
iTerm2 has a basic animated cursor that I like, just a frame or two long, and fairly subtle. It would be nice if it expanded to support this type of animation, I do wish it were a bit more visible (though not, perhaps, the EDM show presented)
This (OP) project is inspired by neovide, a recent neovim gui. And iterm2's animated cursor is a brand new feature, also inspired by neovide.
Honestly, iterm2 is way too nice a piece of software considering the price. A real labor of love from a guy who apparently has lots more free time than me. :-)
This is way cooler than I expected.
It's an over-the-top animation of a terminal cursor moving from position to position, helps notice where it moved to. I thought it'll be something about mouse cursor animations. I could see myself using this if a) I was using more TUI apps and b) it'd be toned down quite a bit.
I think was popularized by Neovide
https://neovide.dev/features.html#animated-cursor
Here it's less dramatic and hence more useful.
I wish more terminals implemented something similar.
Author here, I just chose the fire cursor for the demo. There are lots of other shaders available, eg https://github.com/KroneCorylus/ghostty-shader-playground/tr..., they have a simple smear cursor like Neovide's.
The fire is perfect for the demo, and for screencasts maybe.
Strong second.
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Kitty also supports them with the cursor_trail option: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/conf/#opt-kitty.cursor_trail
As a kitty user, I'll have to try this out.
Thanks!
I never knew this was a thing.
This is so fucking cool. I'm going to add this right away.
The home page has GIFs of both a simpler smear-fade cursor and a wilder manga-slash cursor https://tattoy.sh
Where? I only see the fire one too.
Under the Animated Cursors heading. Here are direct links to the webms if you still can't find them:
https://tattoy.sh/assets/screenshots/cursor_smear_fade.webm
https://tattoy.sh/assets/screenshots/manga_slash.webm
Reminds me of the old Compiz plugin that would make your windows burst into flames on closing.
Compiz effects was truly the killer feature for Linux for 12 year old me :)
14 year-old me set up Linux Mint with this LSD Conky display for my grandmother. I said something like "Well technically it's LSD but it looks cool so don't worry about it".
https://github.com/matmutant/LSD-Conky
in hindsight, I do regret not yet being able to supply my <3 grandma with a small dose, might have condoled her senseless fury (dementia rage or so).. RIP
If you'd like to scratch that itch... https://github.com/Schneegans/Burn-My-Windows
I've not heard of tattoy but I'm glad I ran across it. Most of its usage is not to my taste, but it appears to scratch an itch I've had for some time. I've been chewing on this idea for a... terminal emulator? shell? editor plugin?... something where you could annotate an error message with something like:
> This is fixed in the next release, nothing to see here
or
> I think think one is actually a problem, see issue 1657
And then your coworkers could view the logs in some way (special terminal emulator? piped through some kind of filter? idk) and your annotations would appear in a column next to the logs, perhaps with some background coloring to indicate which annotation goes with which log message. This way you don't all duplicate the effort of deciding whether this particular error is worth worrying about--instead you'd leave notes right there on the error (anchored via context triggered piecewise hashes).
The tattoy protocol seems like it be a good way to apply the highlighting on the logs whenever one that has a matching annotation appears on screen (https://tattoy.sh/docs/plugins/).
That would actually be cool. We have a couple issue patterns with the interface between front and backend that leads to our frontend guys always misinterpreting the reason their API call are failing. Wound be cool to annotate “this error message is usually caused by another error message in <this controller>. Please check for this before assuming…”
It's part of a bigger vision, a sort of general-purpose digital spraypaint, where you don't need write access to the data in order to annotate it and we use patterns in the data itself to index the annotations such that you can direct any bitstream into the app and ask:
> do any of my peers have annotations on any of this?
But I think the way to get there is to make a variety of purpose built apps which all follow the same pattern, and I figure annotations on logs is one of the first ones I'll do. It has been slow going though, holidays and weekends, so it'll be a while.
Best of luck! I know how hard it can be to find time and energy for these sorts of projects, but this is cool
This is exactly the kind of creative thinking I want Tattoy to both inspire and make easy to implement.
I applaud this effort and think it is amazing graphically for a tty, but serious question: does anyone use this as their daily driver?
I'm the creator of Tattoy, so thanks. A significant part of the motivation for the project is that it's fun, like a "toy", as the name suggests. I do use it everyday, but only for one serious usecase, to allow my Twitch chatters to visually interact with my terminal by sending emotes to it. I'm not personally into the animated cursors, they were just easy to implement because I'd already built out support for Ghostty's background shaders.
But, if you want a truly serious usecase, then my pipe dream is that Tattoy becomes the "XWayland" for an entirely new protocol for terminals that explores moving on from ANSI codes, the terminfo database and so on. I wrote a blog post about this idea: https://tattoy.sh/news/an-end-to-terminal-ansi-codes
As in the cursor trailing to new position? I use it, albeit on a different emulator.
Greatly helps when demoing something from my terminal and having multiple splits open.
Looks very nice and fun, and potentially very useful. I was going to say I'd prefer a gradient effect to emulate motion blur, but stepping through the video I see you've already implemented something like that.
However, when making large moves, it seems a bit disorienting and the gradient effect seems very subtle in the video. Perhaps make the effect depend on distance, like actual motion blur would?
I was also thinking about having a color shift when moving up vs moving down, not sure about that one but certainly something I'd play with.
I think this is something that is quite actively being explored in the Ghostty community. And Tattoy automatically benefits from that because it supports the very same cursor shaders. You could check out the Ghostty Discord if you're interested. And of course you can experiment with your own cursor shaders, they follow the same syntax as Shader Toy: https://tattoy.sh/docs/shaders
For a demo of the new Cursor feature in Ghostty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enwDjM7pNNE
This looks cool. I am a bit off topic here. But my only fear is this entices some people to make it the default in terminals over time.
Like all moderne UIs now have animations, ranging from very slow to barely fast enough for my personal perception.
And it becomes increasingly hard to disable those animations. They creep up absolutely everywhere. And they drive me crazy. I want my computer to act instantaneously. Redraw within 8ms.
Almost all animations are also impossible to abort or skip. Worse plenty will animate concurrently. So you might be jumping around on a webpage faster than the animation, which then jumps you back to then slowly animate.
My life on this planet is finite. A computer isstupidly fast. Why waste my precious lifetime? How many minute of life do developers of animations steal from people?
I do understand that I process visual stimulus faster than most people. Making me an outlier. Modern interfaces are devoided of identifiable buttons and all look like a smear of emptiness with a few dollops of text and burger icons to interact with. Making it hard to notice what changed between two actions. Maybe increasing the need for animations to help people follow
In any case, I suffer greatly with animations.
On Mac, I recently mistakenly held Shift (or some other key combo?), before hitting Space to open QuickLook as I was gonna select a few image files. It proceeded to open quicklook with an incredibly slow >5s animation, very annoying :S
I assumed this meant mouse cursors, so I was confused why the pointer didn’t move in the same video. Would have been better just to turn it off for the recording.
This is pretty cool. Helps trace where the cursor is going. I prefer the Ghostty style now that I see it, but nonetheless cool UI feature.
Emacs has https://github.com/Malabarba/beacon
Barely useable, pfff. Needs at least two out of three of
- airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,
- a sixel-based rendering of lens flares, or
- a fluid dynamics engine to simulate rippling of characters around the path along which the cursor moves
(Joke, looks very cool even though i'd probably find it too distracting)
> - airhorn and/or light saber sound effects,
I will take the light saber sounds.
With stereo-spacial transformation, so the sounds "direction" and "distance" match my own physical dynamic orientation relative to the cursor's motion on the screen.
And, the ability to open a small window, which gives me the cursor's visual point-of-view, as it zooms through the graphics on the screen.
Also, each traversed character should get "hot" as the curser goes over it, indicated with a stable glow for a quarter of a second, followed by an exponential fade over another second.
I think we can all agree that when in flow, functional distractions need to work harder, be more immersive, to be effective.
Here you go.
https://ash-k.itch.io/textreme
Testimonial:
> I've never been asked to pair up eversince I've started using tattoy
I installed it with homebrew but I dont see this shader tracer, I even see the blue pixel top right. Ive read the docs but it doesnt seem to explain if I need to do anything further which means it must be my already customised iterm which is the issue. Ill see if I can sort it.
The creator here, sounds like I need to improve the docs. Did you set `enabled = true` in the `[animated_cursors]` section of the config? If so, then this could be bug, and I'd be very grateful for a report in the repo's issues: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy
tbh im not sure what Im doing wrong, I already have a highly customised iterm window and have spent a hour with chatgpt trying to troubleshoot this to no avail... must just be my setup for some reason. I will let you know if I figure it out - thanks
Sorry if I’m missing something, but isn’t the homebrew version outdated?
Oh! You weren't missing anything, the automated Homebrew builds have been giving false positive successes since v0.1.3. I've updated it to v0.1.7 now. Thank you for mentioning this.
Comet Cursor! [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor
Wonder what this looks like in asciinema. Does it show up properly?
I wasn't able to get this working. MacOS, homebrew, added [animated_cursor] to the tattoy.toml and the glsl file.
It very much should work on asciinema, it's all pure text after all.
I'd very much appreciate a bug report. It looks like maybe Tattoy isn't connecting to the GPU on Mac: https://github.com/tattoy-org/tattoy/issues/129
Have you ever lost track of the cursor to require a trail? (and if yes, what shape/color was the cursor)
Yes, happens occasionally. I just wiggle it left/right or up/down so I can see where it is. No big deal. But put of curiosity I might still try that one day, with a more subtle effect though. ;)
What's the shape/color? I guess, non-blinking?
(they have other effects, check effects in neovide for better defaults)
iTerm2 has a basic animated cursor that I like, just a frame or two long, and fairly subtle. It would be nice if it expanded to support this type of animation, I do wish it were a bit more visible (though not, perhaps, the EDM show presented)
This (OP) project is inspired by neovide, a recent neovim gui. And iterm2's animated cursor is a brand new feature, also inspired by neovide.
Honestly, iterm2 is way too nice a piece of software considering the price. A real labor of love from a guy who apparently has lots more free time than me. :-)
Inspiring. So cool, yet useful.
Honestly, just `:set cursorcolumn` is far more useful. Less distractions at the moment of change, but still visible if you alt-tab back.
i swear to god i can hear the laser sounds
Love to see another atuin user
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