I gasped when I first saw Lightroom do this:

I know this won’t have the same effect on you just watching. What happened was that, after I clicked on the Disable button, Lightroom moved the mouse pointer for me.

I don’t think I have ever seen anything like this, and it provoked many thoughts and emotions:

• This feels wrong. If the mouse is the extension of my fingers, and the mouse pointer the extension of the mouse, this is in effect the app grabbing my hand and moving it.
• I did not know this was even possible. I can see how moving the mouse pointer programmatically can be useful in very specific situations (like scrubbing, or accessibility), but… not like this.
• If you do something for the user, won’t that make it harder for them to remember how to do it themselves?
• I’ve seen this kind of a thing many times in my career: Someone genuinely asks “hey, if this is such a huge transgression, why wasn’t it codified somewhere in the style guide?” But to me the challenge is that it’s hard to imagine everything that needs to be preemptively captured and prohibited. I have to imagine this stuff for living, and I literally did not think anyone would just move a mouse pointer like this.

So seeing this now, yeah, I’d bundle this inside the “some interactions are 100% sacred” bucket, alongside focus never being hijacked randomly (especially in the middle of typing), avoiding scrolling anything until I specifically ask, undo and copy/​paste needing utmost protection, and a few more.

In the opposite camp, here’s a fun new project by Neal Agarwal (only worth clicking on a computer with a mouse). This is a situation where it feels perfectly fine for a cursor to be hijacked; as a matter of fact, there is something really interesting about a mouse pointer feeling less like a deity floating above it all, and more like a regular in-game actor.

This reminded me of that time, in the earlier days of Figma, when I prototyped an interaction where you could select someone else’s pointer and press Backspace to delete it:

We didn’t seriously consider it because it felt just too weird, and not that effective in solving “the other person’s cursor is distracting me” problem. But today it feels like it belongs to the same category as the two examples above.

I’ll let you decide if it’s closer to Agarwal’s delight or Lightroom’s terror.