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.
- Aug 18, 2020 How To Change Your Mouse Cursor Size and Color on Mac Mac allows easy changing the mouse cursor size and color. While this gives the impression that the cursor is stuck, you also observe that moving the mouse to the left of the primary monitor actually makes it appear on the right of the secondary monitor.
- The iPad cursor doesn’t look like an arrow pointer, as you would expect from a PC or Mac, but a small grey circle. The circle simulates the size of a fingertip, which makes it fit in better with.
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. On your Mac, use the Mouse & Trackpad pane of Accessibility Pointer Control preferences to make your mouse and trackpad easier to use. The options available depend on the Mac you’re using. To change these preferences, choose Apple menu System Preferences, click Accessibility, click Pointer Control, then click Mouse & Trackpad.
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
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
How To Change Mouse Cursor Color On Mac
- 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.
Ref:
Changing mouse cursor size in MacOS is very simple, yet not always obvious procedure. Default cursor size satisfies almost every Mac user, but there are people out there who want to increase the system’s interface or cursor because of poor eyesight or simply because they do not like the default cursor. Just a matter of taste, you know…
If you are one of these users and want to increase mouse cursor size on Mac, here is what you need to do. For some reason, Apple hides mouse cursor size slider within the accessibility settings, not inside the mouse/trackpad settings. We won’t focus on why it is there. This article rather shows you how to find mouse cursor size settings in macOS Mojave and how to increase it.
Do note that this instruction applies to macOS 10.14 Mojave and above, plus some previous releases. Apple may change something in the future so this article will be updated accordingly. If you want to increase mouse cursor size on Mac which works on very ancient macOS, a procedure may be a bit different.
- Open System Preferences. This “app” is located inside the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen.
- Alternatively, you can open System preferences inside the Launchpad.
- Open Accessibility section.
- Now select Display in the left panel.
- Now adjust the Cursor size slider. A cursor will change its size in the real-time, so no need to restart your Mac.
- Everything is done.
Change Cursor Shape On Mac
Here is an additional thing to note. Take a look at the Shake mouse pointer to locate. This checkbox (it is enabled by default) allows you to quickly find your lost cursor. If your screen is very big and you can’t find this tiny black pointer, just shake the mouse or trackpad quickly, and Mac will increase mouse cursor size so you can find it easily. Not everyone knows about this nifty trick, but now you do.
Mac Change Cursor Icon
Unfortunately, there are not so many cursor settings to customize. In this case, Windows provides much more options and you can check how to increase cursor size on Windows 10 in the separate article.