Thrashing cursor
A thrashing cursor is fast, erratic, high-amplitude mouse movement without productive interaction, such as circling, zigzagging, or shaking the pointer. Like rage clicks it signals frustration or confusion, but earlier: users often thrash while searching for something before they ever click the wrong thing.
How it works
Detection runs on mouse-move data (in rrweb, source: 1 position batches), computing velocity, direction changes, and covered distance over short windows; a high direction-change rate with low net displacement is the signature. Thresholds need care, since fast purposeful movement across a large screen is normal. Because mousemove events are throttled at record time via sampling settings, detection quality depends on recording configuration; the storage optimization recipe documents that trade-off. Aggressive sampling saves storage and coarsens the signal, a trade worth making deliberately.
Where you encounter it
As a secondary frustration signal alongside rage and dead clicks, and in research contexts studying findability, where thrash density over a page approximates "users cannot locate what they need here."