swillner/highlight-pointer

Highlight mouse pointer/cursor using a dot - useful for presentations, screen sharing, ...

Hi there 👋

highlight-pointer's Issues

Wont align with cursor in remote server

This program is almost exactly what I need. I'm using it in GeForce Now Cloud gaming which is basically gaming on a remote server.

--The issue-- The dot and the in-game cursor are out of alignment by about 3-4".
Any ideas how I can jump under the hood and resolve this.

Perhaps another out there desire. Is there any way I can replace the red dot with a png?

The circle is drawn below the drop-down menus (Cinnamon desktop environment)

I would like to thank you for your 'highlight-pointer' program, I think it will be useful to me.

I have only encountered one small inconvenience. The circle is drawn below the dropdown menus (I'm using the cinnamon desktop environment on Debian Sid).

I do not have enough knowledge to evaluate the source code file, 'highlight-pointer.c', but I suspect the key is in the "redraw" function...

I wonder if a "simple" modification to that file would be possible (to plot the circle on top of anything else, except the mouse pointer). Would you know what I should modify to achieve that goal?

Thank you
Leonardo

Thanks

Hi! I'm a high school teacher in Mallorca and just signed up to say thanks for this project. Keeps me away from a MS Windows installation.

Dídac.

Big Thank You and minor thoughts

Having now troubles with my eyes, always seeking the cursor, thank you, the troubles of seeking are gone. Great work!
(But I have further to use a head magnifier with headband for working on screen)
Did you think upon a small .highlight-pointer config file or do you think "cursorhighlighter.sh" which executes highlight-pointer with the desired parameters, or an alias in bashrc is enough?
Problem may be starting highlight-pointer more than once.
Try yourself:
1 Terminal: highlight-pointer --show cursor --outline 3 --radius 30 --auto-hide-highlight
2 Terminal: highlight-pointer --radius 20
looks nice, but could give troubles. (Wrapper with pgrep or lsof or flock or file with PID or ... could prevent this).
Best wishes
Thomas

How to uninstall this?

Opacity

Hello Sven, thanks for this project.

It would be great to have an opacity argument to get something like windows' cursor highlight mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLFfz2ZS1Js

Like:

highlight-pointer --show-cursor --radius 50 --released-color '#ffcc00' --pressed-color '#ff0000' --opactity 0.5

Or maybe to use rgba colors in pressed/released-color argument.

I found this:
https://gist.github.com/ericek111/774a1661be69387de846f5f5a5977a46#file-xoverlay-cpp-L112

But I'm not good with X11 and C to port this from C++.

So, do you see this as a feature?

Thanks.

highlighting sometimes hidden behind dialog windows, and many thanks for a nice utility,

clicking the green 'code' button in the github window
a dialog or info window pops up where the highlighting
together with the cursor stays 'above' the window, visible.
Different clicking e.g. firefox'es menu a dialog appears
where the cursor stays visible, while the highlighting
hides behind the layer of the dialog.
Observed in actual ubuntu with GNOME and Kali with
XFCE4 desktop.
Hope someone will like to improve and hope it's not too
difficult.
And again, thank you very much, very useful utility. :-)

Fault make highligh-pointer

Hello, i trying make my own highlight-pointer following your instructions but i receive a fault in terminal taking:

cc highlight-pointer.c -o highlight-pointer -flto -O3 -Wall -Wextra -Wshadow -std=c99 -lX11 -lXext -lXfixes -lXi
In file included from highlight-pointer.c:31:
/usr/include/X11/Xlib.h:38:10: fatal error: sys/types.h: No such file or directory
38 | #include <sys/types.h>
| ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

if you can help please

Helpfile is not correct?

First of all: A big Thank You for this great tiny programme :)

I encountered the following problem:
The helpfile says:
--released-color COLOR dot color when mouse button released [default: #d62728]

so I tried a different colour with
--released-color #9acd32
which did not work

Only after reading slavas comment in
#3

I realized that the color-code hat to be set between '...'
--released-color '#9acd32'

So maybe you should hint out in the helpfile that the colour-code ist to be set between '...'

Turn on when mouse keys enabled

Would like to have the highlight turn on when mouse keys in linux is enabled. Is there an easy way to do this? Thanks in advance

change the pointer of an xinput device other than the default?

I'm using ssh-rdp to control a PC from a tablet running Linux. ssh-rdp utilizes netevent to forward touchscreen events from the tablet to the PC, recreating the same xinput device(s). If I launch highlight-pointer on the PC or tablet, I only see it work when using the mouse. If I use the touchscreen (which is still a pointer device), I see the default X11 pointer.

edit

I run highlight-pointer --auto-hide-highlight --hide-timeout 1 --radius 10 --outline 2 on the PC, using its mouse the pointer changes as expected.

Just to have the same behavior, I run the same command on the tablet, using the tablet's mouse the pointer changes as expected.

I launch ssh-rdp and see the PC screen on the tablet. If I use the tablet's mouse, the events are forwarded, and I see the highlight-pointer pointer on the PC, but there is a normal X11 pointer overlaid (even with highlight-pointer still running on the tablet and PC). If I use the touchscreen, only the normal X11 pointer is visible. It's not clear to me whether this second X11 pointer is created on the PC or the tablet (I guess the tablet but I'm not sure), even though touchscreen events are forwarded correctly, I don't see pointers on the PC while using the tablet touchscreen.

If I run highlight-pointer after establishing the ssh-rdp connection, with the xinput devices already created, the result does not change.

I created a second pointer with xinput create second and associated it with a second mouse using xinput reattach MOUSEID POINTERID (use xinput --list for the IDs), and I see that highlight-pointer has some issues there too. The pointer appears, clicks are visible, but it doesn't move.

I tried xev to see if there were differences in the generated events but I don't see any significant one (see attached logs).

xinput-devs-on-pc.txt
mouse.log
touch.log

Can't seem to find the correct dependencies to make this library

Hi,
I'm trying to make this but am getting the error below. Tried for a while to find the right packages to install after using the one in the README but am coming up short. If possible any help or pointers would be appreciated.

Thanks for developing this library

(base) canyon@canyon-MS-7A59:/repos/highlight-pointer$ sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libxext-dev is already the newest version (2:1.3.4-0ubuntu1).
libxfixes-dev is already the newest version (1:5.0.3-2).
libxi-dev is already the newest version (2:1.7.10-0ubuntu1).
libx11-dev is already the newest version (2:1.6.9-2ubuntu1.2).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 95 not upgraded.
(base) canyon@canyon-MS-7A59:/repos/highlight-pointer$ make
/home/canyon/miniconda3/bin/x86_64-conda_cos6-linux-gnu-cc highlight-pointer.c -o highlight-pointer -flto -O3 -Wall -Wextra -Wshadow -std=c99 -lX11 -lXext -lXfixes -lXi
highlight-pointer.c:30:10: fatal error: X11/Xatom.h: No such file or directory
#include <X11/Xatom.h>
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
make: *** [makefile:2: highlight-pointer] Error 1
(base) canyon@canyon-MS-7A59:~/repos/highlight-pointer$

Grey Square Background

I'm getting a grey square background around my cursor, and I'm not sure why. Or when it started--I hadn't used highlight-pointer for a long time.

Thank you very much for this project, and if you have any ideas what could be causing it, I'd appreciate it.