Hi. I like to work in fullscreen mode, using green text on a black background. One of the things I find most frustrating about this mode is that the mouse cursor is practically invisible. Part of the problem might be that I have a 15-inch MacBook Pro and I splurged for the higher-resolution display, so it is a 1680x1050 display, which means tiny pixels. In fullscreen mode the mouse cursor (as opposed to the insertion point, which I can change to a different color using revision mode) is almost impossible to see because it is only 1 pixel wide and it is exactly the same color as the text. I would love to be able to make my mouse cursor a bold blue color, or something like that, just so I could see it. Right now I figure out where it is by double clicking on my mousepad – this causes a word on the screen to become highlighted, which locates my mouse cursor for me. I’d rather not have to keep doing this.
So how do I make change the mouse cursor color in fullscreen mode?
Have you tried adjusting the appearance of the cursor in the Full Screen preferences pane? In the middle of this pref pane, you’ll find two options for the “Insertion Point (Caret)”. One will turn off blinking, and the other than expand the width of it to however many pixels you prefer. Not that this can produce a slightly weird result unless you use a fixed width font for writing. I don’t recommend going over 2 or 3 pixels with a variable width font, otherwise it can be difficult to see where the insertion point actually is with very narrow characters, like ‘i’ and the full stop. With a fixed width font you can use higher values since every character has a predictable width.
You can also adjust the cursor for the main editor as well, if you want. Those settings will be in the Editor preference pane, naturally.
As it’s the mouse cursor not the text cursor, the full screen insertion point settings I’m guessing won’t help.
You could try using the system preferences / universal access settings to increase the OS mouse cursor size but it’s a pretty ugly scale effect.
Or you could try “Mouse Locator”, you set up a keyboard shortcut to allow you to find your mouse with a big green target (Default, you can make your own). It’s similar to a tool you see on Windows.
Hmm, yes the pointer itself is more difficult to adjust without it looking awful. Got to love how Apple spent a bunch of time making windows look like melting wax when you minimise them, but have a pointer adjustment system that looks like 1986.
For increasing the visibility of the cursor, you could try something borderline cheesy like this. Some of those are pretty sane, including some one-shot locators rather than trails, and easy to configure to be even more sane, but you’ll never lose the mouse again with Pixie Dust turned on, that’s for sure.
Thanks. I’m using the Universal Access enlarged mouse pointed. It works for full screen mode and I just have a giant mouse pointer for all my normal work now. I can live with it.
