Unless your cursor is very small, and you have an exceptionally high-resolution screen, chances are you won’t lose the cursor. Even if you do, you can shake your mouse to find it. This works for when it’s just you on your system but if you’re recording a screencast on a Mac, or using it to give a presentation, you need a simple way to. Mac allows easy changing the mouse cursor size and color. Though, you can only change the contrast, grayscale, transparency, and inverting screen color so that the cursor becomes more noticeable rather than changing the cursor's color. But you can change cursor size. Mac allows you select a cursor size that suits you the best.
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
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.
Ref:
Customizing the mouse cursor
In addition to the visual feedback that you can provide by changing the appearance of the button when the user interacts with it, you can also change the appearance of the cursor itself. Often, the default arrow cursor on a desktop or laptop browser changes to a hand (known as the pointer cursor) when it hovers over an interactive element or hyperlink. You can choose to change the cursor to a pointer, or choose from among dozens of other cursor types.
Change Cursor Shape On Mac
Using the pointer
The Properties panel controls the cursor appearance and allows you to select a custom icon for each element.
Change Cursor Color Windows 7
- In the Timeline panel, temporarily turn the Display property for the five colorized thumbnail elements to On.
- Select all five colorized thumbnail elements, button1_color through button5_color.
- In the Properties panel, click the Cursor option and choose the pointer icon.
- Turn the Display property for the five colorized thumbnail elements back to Off.
- Preview your Edge Animate composition in a browser by choosing File > Preview in your browser or pressing Ctrl+Enter (Windows)/Command+Return (Mac OS).
- The pointer cursor appears whenever you move your mouse over or click on the buttons.
Turning on the Display property allows you to select them on the Stage.
The colorized thumbnail elements are hidden again.