Enhancement: option to momentarily highlight cursor position when it reappears.

[Penguin-Guru]

The goal would be to help users find the cursor faster. The risks are being distracting or cumbersome. To mitigate those risks, any highlighting would need to be both temporally brief, balanced in terms of drawing enough attention without drawing too much attention, and ideally somewhat aligned with the style of the cursor or desktop environment.

My first thought is to simply make the cursor reappear at double it's normal size and then quickly shrink back down over a duration of perhaps 0.75 seconds. My second thought is that the cursor colour could be changed and then normalised over that same transition duration. Using both might be too much, but I really can't say without seeing it in action. If the colour is to be changed, I think it would be best to make the colour user configurable and default to simply inverting the normal colour. The start size and transition duration(s) would ideally also be configurable.

I seem to recall reading that Apple has a similar function. My understanding is that it's supposed to make the cursor absolutely huge for a brief moment when the mouse is shaken violently. That might also work, but it seems out of scope for this utility and I expect a more brief and much more subtle highlighting that occurs automatically when the cursor is first moved would be easier and just as effective.

[Penguin-Guru]

It seems like this could be done with the currently used XInput2's XIChangeCursor. The animation frames, or at least a single alternate cursor, would still need to be created though.

I don't know if Render's animated cursor construct would have enough benefit to warrant its inclusion. It might be simpler to run the animation loop manually, but that would probably be slightly less efficient. I don't know which approach would require less code. If necessary, I guess a set of cursors could be shipped with the program.