5 ms·

Interestingly enough, disabling cursor blinks on the intel 950 iGPUs resulted in increased powersaving: https://lwn.net/Articles/317922/ https://lwn.net/Article

• newsbinator 5y ago
  And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster! https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-mouse-in-windows-95-made-the-os-faster https://www.extremetech.com/computing/294907-why-moving-the-...
  • chhickman 5y ago
    You can still observe a related effect to this in Windows 10. Open up any large(ish) file in NotePad++ or most any other editor and place the cursor in the text and drag to the bottom of the screen so it starts scrolling. If you hold the mouse still at that point it will scroll through a couple dozen every half second or so, but if you wag the mouse side to side it will scroll through hundreds at a time in the same span.
    • jareklupinski 5y ago
      every time I use this trick, I think of how running diagonally in some games is faster than running in one direction...
      • badRNG 5y ago
        I think that's just because those games are written poorly and don't account for the differences in moving diagonally. If you are moving on a grid, moving forward one tile moves you the length of a tile. Moving diagonally one tile moves you sqrt(2) ~1.4 tile lengths.
        • Akronymus 5y ago
          More often it is because both inputs apply some speed. Like in doom. https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Straferunning https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Straferunning
      • adamrezich 5y ago
        always normalize your input vectors!
    • franga2000 5y ago
      Yeah people always look at me like I'm crazy when I do that, but it really does work
    • munificent 5y ago
      I always assume that it's because the apps simply scroll on both timer events and mouse move events. Wiggle the mouse to raise a bunch of mouse move events and you get faster scrolling.
  • reaperducer 5y ago
    And moving your mouse around made Windows 95 faster! Still the case with macOS in Finder. Even on Big Sur running on an M1. I dealt with this over the weekend.
• bitwize 5y ago
  Remember when Visual Studio Code consumed 13% of one CPU core to blink the cursor?
• jpe90 5y ago
  “A blinking cursor can have a significant effect on battery life, as such we decided to change the default to non-blinking.” Sublime Text 4 Update FAQ, May 2021 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-text-4-update-faq/58001 https://forum.sublimetext.com/t/sublime-text-4-update-faq/58...
  • fxtentacle 5y ago
    Haha, that's probably an electron app. Or they use a really buggy UI framework. Otherwise, I wouldn't know why updating a 4x8 pixel block would cause a significant amount of power usage. Especially if a 286 could do it no problemo.
    • 323 5y ago
      No, it's caused by modern desktops being composited. Changing a single pixel in a window requires a full surface flush of that window to the GPU. There are ways around it, but it requires direct interaction with the compositor, which while supported by the APIs, it's more complicated.
      • hulitu 5y ago
        > No, it's caused by modern desktops being composited. Changing a single pixel in a window requires a full surface flush of that window to the GPU. So evolution. Does this mean that a laptop with lower screen resolution has better battety life ? It explaines why Win 10 is so crappy with screen and cursor updates.
        • salamandersauce 5y ago
          A laptop with a lower screen resolution has entered battery life but that has more to do with the fact you need brighter backlights to get the same brightness from a more dense panel. Pretty common to see 1080p versions of laptops that also have 4K options have significantly more battery life.
          • 5y ago
• mbg721 5y ago
  Any idea what the processor cost of hitting "insert" and having the big rectangular cursor was?
  • csdvrx 5y ago
    The shape of the cursor isn't the problem - the fact that the shape regularly changes when blinking is.