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pointer-trail-emitter

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Build a cursor trail whose spacing stays constant at any hand speed, by emitting motes per unit of distance travelled rather than on a timer, so a flick draws the same continuous ribbon as a crawl instead of breaking into scattered dots. Covers sub-segment placement, the ring-buffer ordering trap, the idle breath a distance emitter needs, anchoring the trail to the screen in a 3-D scene, scaling scatter against the plane it hangs on, coasting instead of stopping dead, touch and reduced-motion fallbacks, and why moving the emitter to a DOM overlay to raise its z-index costs more than it buys. Use for cursor wisps, pointer sparks, embers, magic trails, comet tails, plankton, dust, or any mote trail that must stay legible however fast the hand moves.

skills-imported/pointer-trail-emitter/SKILL.md

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# Pointer Trail Emitter

Build the emitter yourself when the trail's density has to respond to how fast the hand is moving.

Reach for `add-shader-cursor-trail` or `shaders-cursor-ripples` when you want the packaged WebGPU looks from the Shaders library. Reach for `reveal-hover-effect` when the cursor exposes a second image through a mask. Reach for `ambient-section-particles` when motes fill a section and the pointer only disturbs them. Reach for this when the pointer *lays* them.

The bundled demo keeps the stage intentionally neutral. A plain dark field makes spacing, scatter, and coast easy to judge without a background image competing with the trail. The wisps are dependency-free Vanilla JavaScript rendered through the Canvas 2D API; CSS styles the interface only. There are no shaders, WebGL, or Three.js. Keep the live canvas separate from the interface so the emitter stays testable rather than baked into a composition.

## Emit by distance, not by time

This is the whole mechanism. Accumulate the distance the emitter has moved and spend it in fixed steps:

```js
E.acc += moved;
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