Neovide/Kitty-like Cursor Trail/Animation?

[pbnj]

neovide & kitty have a cursor animation feature, called "cursor trail" (see demo gif below).

This feature is helpful as it allows users/viewers to visual track cursor movements and reduces confusion from cursor jumps (e.g. jumping across multiple vim/tmux/terminal buffers/panes/windows/...etc)

Would love to see a feature/option like this added to ghostty.

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Neovide demo gif:

[rhodes-b]

I thought there was already an issue for this but I cant find it

[jrop]

I spent some time looking into how this might be added. I don't know Zig, so while I might try to piece together a PR, I'm less confident in my ability to write idiomatic Zig code. I noted the following observations:

The part the draws the terminal to the "Surface" is:

• src/renderer/OpenGL.zig
• (+other impls, too)

There is a function, addCursor, that seems to add an appropriate sprite to be rendered.
In there, terminal.Screen seems to hold the screen state, including the cursor position.

Screen.zig:Cursor: add additional state to track the prior location, and compute the current (i.e., animated frame) sprite location.

Perhaps Mitchel can offer some guidance on what additional things may need to change for something like cursor-smear/trails to be supported. The current renderer seems to be very "cell"-based, so I am reluctant to start hacking away without understanding what assumptions in the architecture are built on top of this.

[jrop]

Prior conversations:

• Feature Request: Nice to have: Smoother interpolated cursor motions / animation. #1934
• Smooth scrolling #1167
• Smooth scrolling #2355 👈 this one seems like where this conversation should converge.

[noirbizarre]

I am truly interested in this feature because as it has been a game changer this year for me (in Kitty).

I have been amazed by this tweet showcasing a zig implementation: https://x.com/zack_overflow/status/1853494692169896361
Repository (https://github.com/zackradisic/tether) is still empty but maybe @zackradisic would be interested in this? (quoted to avoid ping)

[00-kat]

None yet; no one has had time to work on this as far as I know. I'm fairly certain that animations such as this would require a pretty thorough rewrite of the rendering pipeline, and I don't remember if Qwerasd finished that or not (or perhaps I'm misremembering and they had never started working on it in the first place).

[blurskye]

yea, cant live without it, sadly in neovim, kitty is just laggy, probably because it was written in python, it is fine for couple of thousand of lines, after that, boom laggy aah exp, i switched back to neovide

[00-kat]

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