The cursor is a staple of the desktop interface but is scarcely touched by websites. This is for good reason. People expect their cursors to stay fairly consistent, and meddling with them can unnecessarily confuse users. Custom cursors also aren’t visible for people using touch interfaces — which excludes the majority of people.
Geoff has already covered styling cursors with CSS pretty comprehensively in “Changing the Cursor with CSS for Better User Experience (or Fun)” so this post is going to focus on complex and interesting styling.
Custom cursors with JavaScript
Custom cursors with CSS are great, but we can take things to the next level with JavaScript. Using JavaScript, we can use an element as our cursor, which lets us style it however we would anything else. This lets us transition between cursor states, place dynamic text within the cursor, apply complex animations, and apply filters.
In its most basic form, we just need a div that continuously positions itself to the cursor location. We can do this with the mousemove event listener. While we’re at it, we may as well add a cool little effect when clicking via the mousedown event listener.
That’s wonderful. Now we’ve got a bit of a custom cursor going that scales on click. You can see that it is positioned based on the mouse coordinates relative to the page with JavaScript. We do still have our default cursor showing though, and it is important for our new cursor to indicate intent, such as changing when hovering over something clickable.
We can disable the default cursor display completely by adding the CSS rule cursor: none to *. Be aware that some browsers will show the cursor regardless if the document height isn’t 100% filled.
We’ll also need to add pointer-events: none to our cursor element to prevent it from blocking our interactions, and we’ll show a custom effect when hovering certain elements by adding the pressable class.
Very nice. That’s a lovely little circular cursor we’ve got here.
Fallbacks, accessibility, and touchscreens
People don’t need a cursor when interacting with touchscreens, so we can disable ours. And if we’re doing really funky things, we might also wish to disable our cursor for users who have the prefers-reduced-motion preference set.
We can do this without too much hassle:
What we’re doing here is checking if the user is accessing the site with a touchscreen or if they prefer reduced motion and then only enabling the custom cursor if they aren’t. Because this is handled with JavaScript, it also means that the custom cursor will only show if the JavaScript is active, otherwise falling back to the default cursor functionality as defined by the browser.
const isTouchDevice = "ontouchstart"in window || navigator.maxTouchPoints > 0;
const prefersReducedMotion = window.matchMedia("(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)").matches;
if (!isTouchDevice && !prefersReducedMotion && cursor)
// Cursor implementation is here
Currently, the website falls back to the default cursors if JavaScript isn’t enabled, but we could set a fallback cursor more similar to our styled one with a bit of CSS. Progressive enhancement is where it’s at!
Here we’re just using a very basic 32px by 32px base64-encoded circle. The 16 values position the cursor hotspot to the center.
html
cursor:
url("data:image/svg+xml;base64,PHN2ZyB4bWxucz0iaHR0cDovL3d3dy53My5vcmcvMjAwMC9zdmciIHdpZHRoPSIzMiIgaGVpZ2h0PSIzMiIgdmlld0Jve
D0iMCAwIDMyIDMyIj4KICA8Y2lyY2xlIGN4PSIxNiIgY3k9IjE2IiByPSIxNiIgZmlsbD0iYmxhY2siIC8+Cjwvc3ZnPg==")
16 16,
auto;
Taking this further
Obviously this is just the start. You can go ballistic and completely overhaul the cursor experience. You can make it invert what is behind it with a filter, you can animate it, you could offset it from its actual location, or anything else your heart desires.
As a little bit of inspiration, some really cool uses of custom cursors include:
- Studio Mesmer switches out the default cursor for a custom eye graphic when hovering cards, which is tasteful and fits their brand.
- Iara Grinspun’s portfolio has a cursor implemented with JavaScript that is circular and slightly delayed from the actual position which makes it feel floaty.
- Marlène Bruhat’s portfolio has a sleek cursor that is paired with a gradient that appears behind page elements.
- Aleksandr Yaremenko’s portfolio features a cursor that isn’t super complex but certainly stands out as a statement piece.
- Terra features a giant glowing orb containing text describing what you’re hovering over.
Please do take care when replacing browser or native operating system features in this manner. The web is accessible by default, and we should take care to not undermine this. Use your power as a developer with taste and restraint.