Windows 10: What is the "Hide pointer while typing" feature?

Hello,


What is the "Hide pointer while typing" feature? How does this feature work?

I can't understand what is the feature and How I can test it?


Thanks

:)

 

Mouse settings: Hide pointer while typing has no effect


In Windows 10 there is this option called "Hide pointer while typing" under
Control Panel -> Mouse -> Pointer Options





The idea behind this option makes really sense.
However, it does not seem to have any effect on the following apps I tried. They all behave in the following ways regardless of whether this option is checked or not:

• Notepad and WordPad: Pointer is always hidden while typing.
• Notepad++: Pointer is never hidden while typing.
• MS Word 2016: Pointer is hidden while typing; however hitting the shift key makes it reappear, which of course happens all the time while typing resulting in a flickering pointer...

The behaviour of Word 2016 is the worst of all. While I would prefer the pointer really being hidden while typing, a pointer that is never hidden is still better than that flickering pointer!

Can anybody confirm this behaviour or knows how to resolve it?

 

Mouse settings: Hide pointer while typing has no effect


Thanks for your additional suggestions.

Today though I checked two other PCs at the office both running Windows 10 with Word 2013 and Word 2016 respectively.

In Word 2013, everything is fine. I.e. the mouse pointer stays hidden while typing, even when you press the shift key.
In Word 2016, it was like I described: the mouse pointer always reappears when you press the shift key.

So I conclude that it must be a bug (feature??) of Word 2016.
That's what you get for being an early adopter. *Smile

I might open a bug report with Microsoft.


That the setting in mouse properties of Windows 10 does not have any effect on any program is still another issue. But this is not as bad as that annoying pointer flickering in Word 2016.

 

Pointers

Points are simply a value (address) that "points" to a value. It has no extra information about what it is pointing to (hence the danger). When using arrays/indexers, the operating system knows this is a collection that is this long and is of this type. Any operation that steps outside of those constraints is caught and handled. On the other hand, if a pointer so much as points to the wrong address, all the values will subsequently be wrong.

Pointers are faster but more risky.