[kzahel]

I've watched people who do this (highlighting text and moving the cursor around while reading) and it bugs the heck out of me.

I wonder if there's some kind of app to be made for these people, so that text moves around or changes color when their eyes track toward the text. (This would be horrible, to my taste, but you never know)

[commandar]

>I wonder if there's some kind of app to be made for these people, so that text moves around or changes color when their eyes track toward the text.

I really don't think that would help. For me the highlighting is a lot like tracing along text with your finger as you read on a printed page; it gives my eye a visual cue where I'm trying to track.

The issue is that I can read text faster than my eyes can track without wandering slightly and losing my position in the text, so simply tracking where my eyes are looking wouldn't do anything to mitigate that. It'd just end up highlighting where my tracking gets off anyway.

[davidw]

I worked for a guy who would sit there selecting bits of text on and off while showing me some web page. I wanted to grab the mouse, wrench it from his computer and stomp on it. If it's the kind of thing that floats your boat, fine, to each his own, but don't make other people watch.

[Kluny]

Well, it's a nervous habit, so we'd just have to replace it with a different habit. I would probably bite my nails or scratch at invisible zits, or something equally horrible. So it's nice to have the trackpad to contain your nervous twitching.