Skip to content

No.142 · Cursors

Tether

A name tag on a lanyard. Pick it up from its nail and it hangs from your cursor on a real rope, trailing, swinging when flung and settling like a pendulum. Click anywhere to hang it on a fresh pin; brush past it and it sways. The tag stays a real, clickable link.

The prompt

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

Build a cursor companion: a name tag hanging on a rope that you can carry with the pointer and hang anywhere in its host. Physics: a 14-point Verlet rope, 9px between points, gravity 2200px/s², velocity damping 0.989, fixed 1/120s steps from an accumulator, and 10 constraint passes per step. Point 0 is pinned (inverse mass 0); the last point carries the tag and has inverse mass 0.35, so the card is heavier than the cord and pulls it straight. The tag's rotation follows the angle of the last two segments, −atan2(dx, dy), through its own spring (k 140, c 9), so it lags and over-swings slightly like a real card. The loop sleeps once the rope's kinetic energy and the tag's angular speed have been near zero for 400ms, and wakes on movement. Modes: hung (pin at a fixed nail) and carried (pin = the pointer, written in pointermove). The nail is a real button (aria-pressed, "Pick up the name tag" / "Hang the name tag here") drawn as a brass pin head; clicking it picks the tag up. While carried, the system cursor is hidden inside the host and a small metal clip is drawn at the pointer; the button rides under the pointer, so any click hangs the tag right there (clamped inside the host); Escape hangs it in place; leaving the host hangs it at the edge. Because the pin is always where the pointer is when the mode changes, the rope never jumps. While hung, a pointer moving through the cord (within 16px of a point) or across the card nudges those points by its velocity, so brushing past makes it sway. Drawing: the cord is an SVG path through the points with quadratic curves via the midpoints, a 4.5px round-capped band with a soft drop shadow; the card is an <a> (176px, 14px radius, layered shadow) translated to the last point with transform-origin at its top centre and a metal ring there. Coordinates are host-local and corrected for scaled hosts. Focusing the card hangs it so it can be activated. Paper (blue lanyard) and Night (orange).

Notes

Interaction
Click the nail to pick the tag up and move around; click anywhere to hang it there, or press Esc. Brush past a hanging tag to make it sway; click the tag to open the link.
Motion
Verlet rope at 120Hz; tag rotation on a spring (k 140, c 9); nail and clip 140–180ms.
Accessibility
The nail is a button with an aria-pressed state and a label that says what it will do; the tag is a normal link, reachable by Tab, and focusing it while carried hangs it first. The rope and clip are aria-hidden. Reduced motion hangs the cord straight with no simulation; carrying moves the tag rigidly with the pointer.
Responsive
The nail is placed by fractions of the host and re-placed on resize; the tag is clamped inside the host.
On touch
On touch the tag hangs from its nail and swings when the nail is tapped; it stays a normal link.

Featured

01Glassbreak ButtonA solid plate that fractures from one impact point, cracks racing outward as the shards drift apart.04Liquid GlassA capsule of glass that bends what's behind it, carries a specular highlight around its rim toward your pointer, and squashes like a drop of liquid when pressed.07Phosphor Glass ButtonA liquid-glass pill that senses you coming: its rim light turns to face the cursor and the pill leans in to meet it.08Iris ShutterAn async button with a camera iris for a status light — blades close and turn while it works, then open onto the result.
81Atmosphere CardSmoked-glass link cards: colour pooled in the corners, slow contour currents underneath, a field that leans toward you.93Eclipse Event CardAn editorial event plate with an oversized date and an orbital eclipse bleeding in from the right, alive with slow drift.94Specimen CardAn object mounted under glass: hover lifts the pane with a sweep of reflection and swings out a paper catalogue tag.
95Silk FieldDomain-warped light that pours like liquid silk, with an optional glass lens that refracts the flow under your cursor.106IsobarA living weather map — contour lines traced over a drifting pressure field, with your cursor as a system of its own.
151Prompt ComposerA chat composer where attached files tuck into its top edge like tabs in a folder — they rise from behind it when added and sink back when removed. Send turns into stop while the reply streams.157Aura FieldA writing field where colour only exists while the AI is touching your text: the edge becomes a turning band of light and the words are rewritten in place, one by one, out of a soft blur.
205Halftone CTAA tall CTA banner where slow gold paint drifts beneath a fixed halftone grid, visible only through the dots.
212Nocturne Sign-inA single quiet column on near-black with a breathing seam of frost light behind it — email, password, magic link, nothing more.222Sigil Sign-inA split sign-in whose left half grows a geometric mark from your email — the same address always draws the same sigil.
275Voices CarouselA testimonial exhibition: one large quote at a time on frosted glass, crossfading between voices without ever resizing.
279Feral TitleA brutal condensed wordmark — heartbeat in the dark, letters slam in, a gash tears through and the word bleeds.
301 components