Cursor pointerfeel & caret keyfeel

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The main avatars of 💻desktop computing are the slanted arrow cursor & the flashing-line caret. Let's talk lyrically about each style of embodiment: the pointerfeel of the cursor & the keyfeel of the caret.

🦅The cursor is an eagle soaring above content, changing shape to match its hovered "prey", ready to swoop down with a click. It moves continuously & untrammeled across the entire screen. 🖱️To be a cursor, your hand gloves a pointing device: a mouse or track-pad/ball/point.

👣♟️The caret is a footsoldier at the vanguard of text entry, your man on the ground adapting to the terrain of content & its bounds. It steps, discretely, by letters, lines or cells (also by words or to the edges of lines & paras). ⌨️To be a caret, your fingers play arrow keys.

Cursor & caret are great friends, specially in laptop configurations where the hands scarecely travel between them. The eagle cursor swoops in to rescue the caret & plonks it close to where it's needed, in LOTR fashion.

🐴 The far, far rarer "dials" are a bit like horses, they can gingerly pace stepwise but will gallop at a moments notice, though only in one dimension. My thumbs still remember how fun it was to glide through menus on the iPod's clickwheel.

The joystick is a marvelous shapeshifter: a one-finger pointer that's also easy to chunk into arrows for occasional menus. It's fluidity & compactness shines in modern game controllers, where you usually have two: one for moving you avatar, another for adjusting the 3D camera.

Modern infinite canvases sadly lack the keyfeel navigation of carets! But that OG infinite canvas, the spreadsheet, achieves thru cells an exquisite keyfeel: more predictable than word processors & hacked by advanced users with "landmark handles" (cc @DKedmey & @AJNandi).

In @figma you almost get a caret! You move thru layers by their stack order with (⇧)Tab, out & into groups with (⇧)Enter, and thru frames by their "row" order with (⇧)N. But, as @brianjoseff points out, to rely on this you must construct & maintain your space obsessively.

What made a tool like 2006 Dasher so radical (and radicalizing) was that it allowed us to navigate the letter-space of written language by pointer. We had only ever known it through keyfeel! Dashing was a damburst for both abled & disabled. twitter.com/disconcision/status/1579973825596645376

Maybe you think this thread strange but what's strange to me is how rarely we pay attention to matters of digital phenomenology. That's a fancy word but really it's just "feel-ology", attending to how interactions feel. Inspired by @maxkriegers & @rsnous: twitter.com/maxkriegers/status/1345574975974027265 twitter.com/maxkriegers/status/1345574975974027265

Ultimately, what I want is "software criticism" like @sheonhan proposes: wired.com/story/software-criticism/ Not assessments of the whole of tech, of which we have plenty. Focused interrogations of single works that show us how to see, a "rough blend of product review & lit crit".

.@craigmod does fantastic software criticism, like when he rhapsodized about iPad's 2020 cursor wired.com/story/ipad-trackpad-cursor/ Upon finding unexpected joy in a trackpad's indirect manipulation: "The cursor lives in the same virtual space as the interface in a way our finger never can."