"cursor locked to current screen" has no indication in UI

[agilbertson1977]

Operating Systems

Server: Windows 7 Enterprise Version 6.1 Build 7601: Service Pack 1)

Client: macOS Mojave 10.14.6

Barrier Version

2.3.2

Steps to reproduce bug

Can a UI element be added to indicate that the cursor is locked to the current screen? I started Barrier on my server side with scroll lock enabled (using a wireless keyboard so no indicator light for it) and wasn't able to figure out why Barrier showed that it had connected but I wasn't able to move my mouse cursor off the server and on to the client.

[brianjmurrell]

I didn't even know you could lock the cursor to a screen with scroll-lock. Mine had gotten locked and luckily the log said so. A google search later and I am here.

[github-actions]

Is this issue still an issue for you? Please do comment and let us know! Alternatively, you may close the issue yourself if it is no longer an problem

[brianjmurrell]

Yes, it's still an issue.

[Xavier-Do]

This issue helped me to understand why I had this error message. +1

[StuartRothrock]

I am so pleased I found this post. Thank you. I did not know it was available. If I connect to the server with a VNC session and accidently move the mouse to an active border, the mouse locks up. This should protect the mouse by activating scroll lock when starting the VNC session. Thanks!

[barnaba]

Heh, I've killed barrier because I thought it doesn't work anymore so many times... Now I think I have just been locking my cursor to a screen by accident. Finally got so fed up with this behavior I didn't understand I googled this issue.

I think the user friendly behavior would be either:

1. show a popup (like say virtualbox when it's grabbing your controls for VM), explaining what's going on. This popup should have an option to never show in the future.
2. indicate that the cursor has been locked via notification (possibly annoying for workflows that involve a lot of locking and unlocking, if such workflows exist... Gaming?).

[StraggleCraft]

Also finally figured this out... it would be great if while trying to leave the screen if a popup came up (maybe with a "stop showing this message") when you tried to exit the screen while the lock was enabled.

[jephthai]

The tray icon for barrier already shows information, such as the green check when connected. Could it not be set up to show a little padlock or something when scroll-locked?

I'm another one who couldn't figure out what was going on, finally noticed the "locked to current screen" message, and google brought me here. I can see the use of the feature, but it's almost invisible! I don't know how many times I killed and restarted Barrier when I had simply used scroll lock instead of the HOME key by mistake.

[brianjmurrell]

My suggestion would be a popup of some sort when barrier deduces that the user is trying to move the mouse cursor off of the screen and failing. Deducing such shouldn't be too difficult. Several/many repeated attempts to move the mouse off a defined edge should be obvious.

[Dakkaron]

Thanks for posting this issue. I had that problem and couldn't figure out, why I couldn't move the mouse off the screen.

[joshuaeckroth]

Please add a notification. This "feature" nearly caused me to stop using barrier altogether.

My experience: I would come back to my Linux machine (barrier server) and discover the screen was off (sleeping), yet moving the mouse did not recover the screen, and neither did typing on the keyboard. It stayed black, and I had to switch to a console and kill Xorg, losing my programs. I knew I had installed barrier somewhat recently, so I thought that could be the problem, but I didn't know about any log file. So I stopped using barrier for a bit and the problem did not reproduce itself. Today, I ran barrier again but directed the output to a log file, and noticed, while using both machines, the cursor got locked on my Windows machine. Thankfully, I noticed the behavior while I was sitting here. The log file gave me the appropriate message so I finally figured out what was happening. This message and feature are much too obscure and can cause significant frustration.

[JonathanTippy]

I too came here because i accidentally locked my mouse to a screen and didn't realize it was scroll lock. I hope this post never goes away because i may return xD

[crazydef]

I too arrived here after wasting five minutes restarting, killing the process, restarting again, enabling full logging, and finally googling the error message.

In addition to the icon changing to a padlock, when the user is blocked from transitioning because the cursor is locked, a notification over the tray icon should appear.

[samueljohnson]

It appears that this issue is still unresolved.

Many users might not think to check journalctl entries. Therefore, it would be better if this scroll lock 'feature' were turned off by default, or if some form of visual indicator were provided.