Multiple Mouse Cursors in Wayland: A Deep Dive into Multi-Seat Support
I spent three weeks exploring how well Linux and Wayland support multiple mouse cursors on a single desktop. While the core protocol is deeply integrated, support varies across compositors like Weston, sway, and niri, as well as libraries like GTK and SDL. I discovered surprising capabilities for pair programming and gaming, but many pieces of the puzzle remain incomplete. I am sharing tools and open project ideas to help expand this collaborative computing space.
This style of multi-player computing facilitates collaboration inside of applications very naturally, without the need for complicated synchronization algorithms.
- ofalkaed
I have never liked split keyboards but I might if each keyboard was also a mouse with its own cursor, it seems fun to develop the skill to work that way. Would also be useful at times if the the Thinkpad trackpoint and trackpad could each have their own cursor and I could leave one somewhere. Or maybe a cursor stack like pushd/popd, registers would probably work better; instead of virtual desktops just give me one massive desktop with cursor locations I can jump between, switch to cursor 3 it saves the location of the current cursor and jumps.
- ben-schaaf
To add to the long list of caveats: This also breaks assumptions GUI toolkit and applications make about only one of their windows being focused at a time: `gtk_application_get_active_window`, `QApplication::activeWindow`, etc.
- gorgoiler
I wish libinput gave the option for pointer inertia, where the pointer glides to a gradual rather than a hard halt after you stop moving it. I’m limited to a trackpad these days and it’s a really nice feature on my Steamdeck that I’d love to have on my Thinkpad.
Come to think of it, Steamdeck is Wayland? How do they implement it?
- kelnos
I'm building a compositor now, and I've been thinking about multi-seat from the beginning, but I know there are lots of places that assume a single seat, and so this sort of thing won't work for me. It's actually a lot more work than you'd think to support this...
- solarkraft
This is cool. I feel like I shouldn’t be the only one who as a kid connected up an extra mouse to their computer with their buddy and was disappointed to still only have one cursor.
The way screen sharing solutions like Teams handle the multi cursor thing is to just keep the main cursor jumping around, which works, but meh.
Having multiple cursors within the same environment theoretically enables such interesting collaborative experiences. Imagine a large surface in which everyone has their own workspace (cluster of windows), but you can seamlessly go between them …