Many of us can’t use the computer without having a mouse. However, using the mouse with the default settings may not work well for all users. For example, the default mouse pointer size is not sufficient for those people with vision problems. This will lead to eye strain, especially when trying to locate the cursor in white background Word documents. Fortunately, both Windows and Mac operating systems allows you to change mouse pointer size.
Without a cursor, your Mac would be pretty hard to use. In fact, it would be all but impossible to use, save for a few keyboard shortcuts. The cursor is what makes it so easy to navigate around. Dec 07, 2020 Select a color for your cursor under 'Pointer color.' Just click the option you want to use under this heading to change your cursor's color. You can select a: White pointer, which will always be white.
Related:How to locate mouse pointer quickly in Windows?
Mac Pointer Download
Change Mouse Pointer Size in Windows
Login to your Windows computer and press “Win Logo + I shortcut keys. This will open Windows Settings app. Alternatively, you can go to Start menu and click on the gear settings icon to open Windows Settings app. The app will look like below having multiple sections. click on “Ease of Access” to open accessibility settings page.
Go to “Cursor & pointer size” section to change the size of cursor and mouse pointer.
Below are the options you can customize:
- Change cursor thickness – drag the bar to increase the thickness of the cursor. This will be useful, if you are struggling to locate the cursor in documents.
- Change pointer size – Windows offers three sizes to choose for your pointer. By default smaller size is used and you can choose medium or larger size based on your need.
- Change pointer color – If you notice, Windows by default show the mouse pointer in white color and cursor in black color. Sometimes, this can cause trouble in locating and you can invert the color of the pointer/cursor to improve the visibility. In addition, you can also make the pointer / cursor transparent, so that it will not hide the content behind.
If these options are not enough for your need, you may need to find a third-party app to customize further.
Related:10 tips to use your mouse productively.
Change Mouse Pointer Size in macOS
Similar to Windows computers, you can also change the mouse pointer for better accessibility in Mac. After logging into your Mac, press “Command + ,” shortcut keys. Alternatively, go to “Apple Menu > System Preferences…” to open settings panel.
When you are in “System Preferences” panel, click on “Accessibility” icon to open accessibility settings.
You will see many sections on the sidebar, click on the “Display” option and go to “Cursor” tab.
Drag the bar against “Cursor size” option to increase or decrease the cursor size as per your need. Unlike Windows, Mac offers seven levels from normal to large for choosing the cursor size.
Sometimes after writing some code in the terminal, I find it very hard to find my mouse pointer quickly because it is very invisible in the dark background. So I decide to find a good way to solve this problem.
Actually there is not very good post about the mouse pointer in Mac, that is why I write this blog post.
1. Change system mouse cursor size
OSX does not have options for changing the color of the mouse pointer, but you can change the size of if in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display
to make the mouse pointer bigger.
2. Add something around the cursor
You can use some 3-party software such as Mouse locator to creates a green crosshair of sorts around the cursor making it easy to identify. I did not test this way but you can try as you like.
3. Change system mouse cursor image
I like github. I found an open source software called Mousecape in github here, which allows the customization of cursors for Mac OS X 10.8-10.10, you can use it to change the cursor of your mac quickly. If you do not want to create the icon by yourself, just use the default cape
file in the source. It works great!
5. Why it still looks so bad in some application
Change Pointer Color Free
After changing the mouse pointer by using Mousecape, I found the cursor looks still bad in iTerm2 app, then I realized that some app such as iTerm2 might use the image of its local file instead of global. Actually I got that somebody have the same problem since the mouse cursor is not invisible in darkground xcode.
Many people like set the iTerm2 background to dark, so if we change the image file used by iTerm2 to show the mouse cursor, then our problem can be fixed. Here we go
- Download this cursor image to your mac
- Enter the directory
/Applications/iTerm.app/Contents/Resources
- Rename the IBarCursor.tiff to IBarCursor.tiff.bak, IBarCursorXMR.tiff to IBarCursorXMR.tiff.bak
- Put the downloaded image to this directory and rename it to IBarCursor.png and IBarCursorXMR.png
- Now close iTerm2 and restart it, you can see the mouse in the app is more visible than before.