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). See also: Text field 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.

In human–computer interaction, a cursor is an indicator used to show the current position on a computer monitor or other display device that will respond to input.Ĭursor is Latin for 'runner'.

JSTOR ( May 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī blinking text cursor while typing the word ' Wikipedia'.

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