The position of the cursor also may be changed by moving the mouse pointer to a different location in the document and clicking. These include the four arrow keys, the Page Up and Page Down keys, the Home key, the End key, and various key combinations involving a modifier key such as the Control key. In a typical text editing application, the cursor can be moved by pressing various keys. On text editors and word processors of modern design on bitmapped displays, the vertical bar is typically used instead. In situations where a block was used, the block was usually created by inverting the pixels of the character using the boolean math exclusive or function.
In text mode displays, it was not possible to show a vertical bar between characters to show where the new text would be inserted, so an underscore or block cursor was used instead. In most command-line interfaces or text editors, the text cursor, also known as a caret, is an underscore, a solid rectangle, or a vertical line, which may be flashing or steady, indicating where text will be placed when entered (the insertion point).
The cursor for the Windows Command Prompt (appearing as an underscore at the end of the line) He wrote that the "bug" would be "easier" and "more natural" to use, and unlike a stylus, it would stay still when let go, which meant it would be "much better for coordination with the keyboard." Īccording to Roger Bates, a young hardware designer at ARC under Bill English, the cursor on the screen was for some unknown reason also referred to as "CAT" at the time, which led to calling the new pointing device a "mouse" as well.
On 14 November 1963, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Douglas Engelbart of Augmentation Research Center (ARC) first expressed his thoughts to pursue his objective of developing both hardware and software computer technology to "augment" human intelligence by pondering how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to inputting X- and Y-coordinate data, and envisioned something like the cursor of a mouse he initially called a "bug", which, in a "3-point" form, could have a "drop point and 2 orthogonal wheels".
The term was then transferred to computers through analogy. A cursor is a name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline used to mark a point on a slide rule. This is to avoid "cursor confusion," since most people can't type and click on things at the same time.Cursor is Latin for 'runner'. In most word processing programs, once you start typing, the text cursor continues to flash, but the mouse pointer disappears until you move the mouse again. However, if you want to insert a word or phrase somewhere else in a line of text, you can use the mouse cursor to click the position where you would like to insert the text. Typically, when you are typing a paper, the cursor will be at the end of the line, because you are adding new text to the uncharted white area of the page. The text cursor is typically a straight vertical line or I-shaped object that flashes in a line of text. The mouse cursor can change into other images, such as a small hand (when you roll over a link in a Web page), or an hourglass (when Windows is "thinking" so hard, it won't let you click on anything). When the cursor is over an object, you can click or double-click the mouse button to perform an action on that object (such as opening a program). The mouse cursor is most often an arrow that you can use to point to different objects on your screen. The cursor on your screen can indicate two things: 1) where your mouse pointer is, or 2) where the next character typed will be entered in a line of text.