Ever lose your mouse arrow (cursor) on your screen and have to squiggle the mouse around to find it? It’s no wonder you can’t see the arrow. Macintosh cursor arrow size was defined way back at the beginning when all Macs had those little 9 in screens. As our monitors got bigger and pixel size got smaller the cursor didn’t adjust.

With OS X.4 Apple finally caught up with itself. You can now set the cursor size in System Preferences. The setting is a bit buried so listen close my friends.

In System Preferences choose Universal Access. Then click on the Mouse and Trackpad tab. The bottom most slider on the panel is Cursor Size. As you slide the little blue triangle back and forth you will see the cursor change to match your settings. You can make it really big if you want. The enlarged cursor also looks a little jagged, but at least you can find the little beggar.

If you don’t have Tiger, there is still some relief. The free Cursor Zoom is a preference pane that allows those using OS 10.2 or higher to magnify their cursor up to 4X (you could also cut the cursor size in half, but I’m not sure why you’d want to). The size of the cursor will be returned to the system default when you log out or restart your Mac.

You may not need a bigger and uglier cursor, just a way to find the darned thing on a big screen. Take a look at 2Point5Fish.com’s free Mouse Locater.

As its name implies, it’s a utility that draws a large green target around the cursor when your mouse is idle for a user-configurable period of time or when you invoke a user-defined hotkey. You can actually combine Mouse Locater with a very slightly larger cursor. That’s what I do.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 19th, 2006 at 11:51 pm and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.