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No.146 · Cursors

Snap Frame

An adaptive pointer. A soft dot at rest; over a control it becomes a highlight in that control's own shape and corner radius, with the control leaning toward you. Over text it turns into a caret the height of the type, snapped to the line. Tab moves the same frame.

The prompt

The design brief behind this component — reuse it to regenerate, remix, or explain it.

Build a scoped adaptive pointer: one drawn shape that changes what it is depending on what it is over, inside a wrapper component. Scope: the host gets data-live only under (hover: hover) and (pointer: fine); that sets cursor:none (with !important) on it and every descendant, fields included, because the component draws its own caret. An aria-hidden, pointer-events:none layer above the children holds a single absolutely-positioned div. Coordinates are host-local CSS pixels, corrected by rect.width / offsetWidth so it works when the host is drawn scaled. The shape is five springs — centre x, y, width, height and corner radius — slightly under-damped (k 520, ζ 0.86) so a morph lands with life but never wobbles; one rAF loop runs only while a spring is moving. It has three modes, chosen from the element under the pointer: • Dot: 16px circle (12px while pressed) at the pointer, ink at 26% with a hairline. Its position is written in the pointermove handler, not on the next frame. • Frame: over a[href], buttons, role=button/tab/radio/menuitem or [data-snap]. Measure the control's untranslated rect and computed border-top-left-radius (clamped to half its height). The shape grows to the rect plus 4px each side with radius + 4, as an 8% ink highlight with a 1px ring and a faint 4px halo, blended with multiply on paper and plus-lighter on night so text stays readable through it. Magnetic: from the pointer's offset from the centre (−1..1 on each axis) the control leans up to 4px (2.8px vertically) via the translate property, on its own spring per element so it eases home after you leave; the highlight leans further (×1.7, ×1.2), so it feels like light under your finger. Pressing scales the control to 0.97 and the frame to 0.96. • Beam: over p, headings, li, label, input, textarea or [data-snap-text]. A 2.5px caret with height = font-size × 1.18, centred on the line box under the pointer: top of the text box plus padding, then floor((y − top) / line-height) + ½. Inputs centre it vertically. Accent colour. Keyboard: on focusin of a :focus-visible control the frame wraps it (no lean), so Tab moves the frame; on focusout it hides unless the pointer is inside. The pointer appears at its entry point (springs snapped), fades out on leave, and re-measures on scroll or resize. Paper and Night themes.

Notes

Interaction
Move between the toolbar, tabs, links and buttons; rest over the paragraph to get the caret; press Tab to walk the frame through the controls.
Motion
Five springs (k 520, ζ 0.86) for x, y, width, height and radius; per-control lean springs (k 380); colours 180ms.
Accessibility
The drawn shape is aria-hidden and never takes focus; every control keeps its own focus-visible outline, and the frame follows keyboard focus too. Reduced motion (the media query or motion="reduced") jumps between shapes with no springs or lean.
Responsive
Measurements are host-local and re-taken on scroll and resize; works at any size and inside scaled previews.
On touch
Coarse pointers draw nothing and keep the system cursor; focus-following still works for keyboards.

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