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'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/).
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
Animated Cursors
(tattoy.sh)244 points by speckx 25 July 2025 | 54 comments
Comments
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.
> 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/).
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.
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.
- 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)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_Cursor
I wasn't able to get this working. MacOS, homebrew, added [animated_cursor] to the tattoy.toml and the glsl file.