On computers, why is the mouse constrained in the left and top borders of the screen, but can go past the bottom and right border of the screen?
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You can think of it like your screen is a box with walls, and your mouse hovers above the box. Then, there’s a long spike at the very tip of your mouse pointer that pokes down into the box.
If you move the mouse to the top left, the spike at the tip of the pointer hits the walls at the corner and keeps the mouse from moving any farther. Since the spike happens to be at the top left tip of the pointer arrow, none of the arrow goes off the screen.
If you drag it to the bottom right, the pointer is free to move off the screen, until the nail at the tip clips the corner. So it never *fully* goes off the screen, it just barely hangs on.
It’s not a very well-known feature, but you can actually change your mouse pointer to look like anything you want. The default happens to be an arrow with that imaginary spike lined up with the tip. But you could just as well go into the system settings and change it to, I dunno, a crosshair or a ring target, where the spike is in the dead center. Or if you’re masochistic, you can even keep the default pointer, but move the spike to the dead center of the arrow instead of the tip. If you had a pointer like one of those, then everything beyond the imaginary spike would go offscreen whenever you drag the pointer to one of the screen’s edges or corners. It’s just that singular point where the spike is that has to stay on the screen, the rest of it is just decoration.
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