🖱️ Cursor Tracking: Position Monitoring & Interactive Effects
Category: machine-coding
Difficulty: hard
Interview Importance: 🟡 Important — Cursor tracking appears in 20% of frontend machine coding interviews, testing event handling, performance optimization, debouncing/throttling, and real-time UI updates. Common in companies building interactive experiences or analytics platforms. 1️⃣ What is Cursor Tracking? Cursor Tracking is the process of monitoring and recording mouse cursor movements, positions, and interactions on a web page. It captures the x and y coordinates of the cursor in real-time and can be used to create interactive visual effects, collect user behavior analytics, implement custom cursors, or build collaborative features. Visual Representation: [code example] Real-World Analogy: Think of cursor tracking like GPS tracking on your phone. Just as GPS continuously monitors your location to provide navigation or track your running route, cursor tracking monitors the mouse position to enable features like heatmaps showing where users click most, spotlight effects following the cursor, or custom cursors that change based on what you're hovering over. 2️⃣ Why Use Cursor Tracking? / Why Does This Matter? Problem Need to highlight area under cursor Default cursor doesn't match brand/UX Don't know where users focus attention Static backgrounds feel boring Need contextual information near cursor Need to capture user drawing input Team members can't see each other's cursors Need to understand user navigation patterns...