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No.138 · Cursors

Halo Pointer

A crisp arrow with a soft light behind it. The arrow never lags your hand; the halo follows on a spring, stretches along the direction you move, takes the colour of whatever you point at, and throws one faint ring when you click.

The prompt

Written for the variant you picked above: Azure

Build a scoped custom cursor: a wrapper component whose children get a drawn arrow with a soft coloured halo, without touching the cursor anywhere else on the page. Scope: the host is position:relative; an aria-hidden, pointer-events:none layer (absolute, inset 0, overflow hidden, contain strict) sits above the children. Only when (hover: hover) and (pointer: fine) matches does the host get data-live, which sets cursor:none on it and every descendant (with !important, so buttons don't bring the hand back). Text fields (input, textarea, select, contenteditable) get cursor:auto back, and the drawn cursor fades out while over them. Pointer coordinates are converted to host-local CSS pixels using the ratio rect.width / offsetWidth, so the cursor stays exactly under the pointer when the host is drawn scaled. Arrow: a 24px SVG, a short arrowhead (M3 3 L20.4 9.6 L12.5 12.4 L9.6 20.4 Z) with round joins, black fill and a 1.75px white keyline drawn under the fill (paint-order: stroke), a small drop shadow; a light variant swaps them. The svg is offset so its tip is the hotspot. Its translate is written in the pointermove handler itself, never waiting for a frame. It leans up to 8° into horizontal velocity and rights itself, and shrinks to 0.86 while pressed. Halo: two radial-gradient discs centred on one origin — a 64px bright core (62% → 30% → 9% → transparent of the halo colour, mixed in oklab) and a 148px veil at 4–9% with a faint rim, like light falling off a lamp. No blur filters. It follows on a critically damped spring (k = 300, c = 2√k) in a single rAF loop that sleeps once everything settles and wakes on movement. It stretches along the direction of travel: scaleX = 1 + min(0.85, speed / 2200) with scaleY = 1/√scaleX, rotated to a heading that only updates above 40px/s so it never spins at rest. Colour: register --hp-c as a <color> with @property and transition it 260ms. Over an element with data-halo="#hex" the halo takes that colour and grows to 1.35× on a spring; pressing tightens it to 0.78× with a brighter, smaller core; release throws one ring (scale 0.25 → 1.25, fading, 620ms) at the release point, restarted by alternating data-pulse a/b between two identical keyframes. On entering the host the halo appears at the entry point instead of sweeping in. Props: color, arrow ("dark" | "light"), motion. Selected variant — Azure: color="#3b82f6" (azure), arrow="dark", on a white page (#ffffff, ink #111113, muted #6b6b73). Route cards override the halo with their own data-halo colours (#f59e0b, #14b8a6, #8b5cf6).

Notes

Interaction
Move over the page; point at a route card to tint the light; click to throw a ring. The system caret returns in the email field.
Motion
Arrow 1:1 with the pointer. Halo on a critically damped spring with velocity stretch; colour 260ms; grow on a spring; release ring 620ms.
Accessibility
The drawn cursor is aria-hidden and pointer-events:none; it never takes focus or changes focus styles. Text fields get the system cursor back. Reduced motion (the media query or motion="reduced") keeps the halo locked under the arrow with no stretch, lean or ring.
Responsive
Works at any host size; coordinates are corrected for scaled hosts, so it also behaves inside gallery thumbnails.
On touch
On touch or coarse pointers nothing is drawn and the system cursor is untouched; the content works as normal.

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301 components