this one feature had freaked more ppl out than anything i’ve seen since i’ve been coming here.
maybe if the raster image weren’t so crude looking, ppl wouldn’t be so quick to assume its a bug
maybe when it blows up to certain size, it should have text that says
CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?!?
Maybe it needs some sort of notification explaining what it is the first time it is triggered 
that’s probably the more grown up solution 
Thanks, I found and disabled it. That has to be one of the weirdest features I’ve encountered, the purpose of which I don’t quite understand except as an Easter Egg? For the longest time it seemed like a bug causing the pointer to reset and not detect the resolution accordingly, was sure it’s a Wayland issue since a few of them still occur, I finally asked seeing it didn’t get fixed for so long 
Definitely in favor of disabling it by default.
I find it very useful myself, especially on my multi monitor PC setup, and a bit more so when there are different screen sizes involved. Laptop and external monitor, for example .
I can’t find the cursor sometimes.
Now, my issue is that I find it hard to trigger this myself. I wish it was a bit easier, or maybe I’m just doing it incorrectly. But obviously some people can trigger it easily.
The real fix if for Linux to finally update/replace the cursor system so maybe we can have better rendering as well as other features.
Fun tidbit:
I can make the cursor gradually increase to a massive size if I shake it just right while it is zoomed, then repeat this each time it grows, lol. This seems to have been ‘fixed’ in a recent Plasma update or I just can’t reproduce it anymore.
What is shaking related to finding it though? It gets triggered randomly as the system seems to think I’m shaking just by moving it between windows or circling around too rapidly.
I could see this being useful but maybe as a system shortcut. Also increasing the size may not be the best way: I’d have something like a large circle closing inward similar to a radar blip.
I’ve noticed people tend to shake their mouse in frustration when they can’t find it. Not an empirical study and I wasn’t behind the decision but anyway.
A similar but different implementation to finding the mouse I use is the “Track Mouse”. Go in System Settings → Window Management → Desktop Effects and find “Track Mouse” and check the box, you can configure at right on that row what keys are used as the hot keys, I use Ctrl+Win keys.
When you press the Track mouse keys, you’ll see a circling loop around the mouse.
I like the Track Mouse because the shake mouse is too easy to trigger by accident
I share this impression. It was hard for me to imagine that someone could have a problem with this happening by accident. I have to shake the mouse vigorously for a full second or more. Do you also disable acceleration?
I do, and I recently added a new mouse (first time since ‘shake cursor’ was added), getting the default accel, and the mouse’s high DPI out of the box… boy oh boy was the shake cursor ready to rumble. When I disabled acceleration and reduced the mouse’s DPI, both had a huge effect on this feature. I immediately understood that the feature is tuned for the default mouse settings, and that my disabling acceleration had a negative effect on it.
I have to say I agree with claydoh. I have multiple monitors and find myself using it quite often.
Ironically I discovered it when shaking my mouse to try and find it so it was kinda intuitive to me. I can see how it could be weird if it triggered by accident for someone though, it’s not easy for me to trigger it personally so it’s never been an issue. I guess the ease of trigger is dependant on people’s mice or something like pallaswept described. I don’t use acceleration either.
My relatively new JLabs mouse has multiple DPI settings, but for me, changing this via its dedicated button doesn’t seem to affect it for me – accel enabled. 1200 is its lowest, and is what I usually use. Sometimes 1600. 2000 and 2400 don’t seem to make it easier for me, though I didn’t spend much time on it.
My previous Logitech M720 behaved in a similar fashion, though I never changed its DPI (via software) or other settings.
I imagine touch and trackpads may be more susceptible? I haven’t noticed myself, but haven’t looked much.
Ok, I can still en-huge-en the cursor
You don’t have to. It just requires your mouse to keep traveling back and forth within a time period. You can shake or move in circles quite slowly (like ~two rounds in one second) and it will trigger.
OHHH Now, I see how people could do this by accident! So it’s not the momentum change, it’s the angular momentum change. Now I will have much better control of this.
For a fun experiment we can easily trigger it with quite slow and steady movement in a circle, but an infinity-sign has to be way faster 
I feel like ‘shake cursor’ is a very misleading term for this action. This is ‘spin cursor’ lol At least now, I can understand why shaking harder didn’t help matters much 
If I shake more, in the right direction, I could even make it less sensitive.
Very insightful, thanks
The actual algorithm is:
(And the bounds must be >100px. So shaking in too small distance wouldn’t trigger.)
So the factor 4 is where the “two rounds” idea comes from. When you go back and forth twice, you travel roughly 4 times the bounds.
But the original intention is to trigger when you shake the mouse, and to not accidentally trigger in normal use. The actual algorithm used is an implementation detail.
stop it man, you’ll go blind!
Maybe adding a threshold setting would be good for those who activate it by accident.
Personally I’m in the same boat as @Daniel_Bull and I’ve never had it trigger by accident.
I guess it depends on everyone’s movement pattern. I’d trigger it by accident about once a day or more, maybe because I tend to be more rushed. Usually because I move the cursor quickly around a small area for any reason, like switching between windows or multiple buttons there.
(Split this one out as there’s a lot of good dialog, following up on a Help post that was already solved, that fits well in the Brainstorm category )
