Mouse Pointer Locator

Question

Due to a stroke, I have had some vision impairment in that I sometimes have a hard time locating my mouse pointer on the screen. I have tried making the mouse pointer larger which helps but is still not the solution.

I am new to the Mac world and would appreciate your help.

In Windows, there is an option where pressing the CTRL key will help to identify the mouse pointer using a temporary display of several radiating concentric circles around the mouse pointer. Is there something like this on OS X?

Answer 1

In the release of OS X El Capitan, just shake the cursor to locate it.

From Apple:

Call out your cursor.

Lost your cursor on your crowded desktop? Just shake your finger back and forth on the trackpad or give your mouse a shake, and the cursor gets bigger so it’s easy to spot.

To enable/disable this feature, go to System Preferences > Accessibility > Shake mouse pointer to locate

Shake mouse pointer to locate

Quickly move the mouse pointer back and forth to make it bigger.

Answer 2

Pointer Finder

This app will put a circle around your cursor when you press a key.

Answer 3

With OS X El Capitan and later, all you need to do is move the mouse back and forth quickly, and it will automatically make the mouse bigger. The advantage of this is that you don't need to manually set your mouse to a bigger size if you don't want to.

If this doesn't work for you, the option to turn it on can be found in System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Shake mouse pointer to locate.

Answer 4

Mouse Locator

Highlights the cursor with a green circle upon keypress.

• Highly visible locator instantly reveals your mouse position.
• Controllable trigger time period, from 1 second to 30 minutes.
• Eliminates the frustrating search of your screen.

Answer 5

Mac OS X's built-in option is restricted to increasing the mouse cursor size. System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Display -> Cursor Size While this will help with your issue by making the mouse easier to find, it doesn't highlight the mouse, and you get side effects such as a larger mouse text selection tool which makes it harder to work with text.

The old go-to solution was OmniGroups's OmniDazzle, but this no longer works on most current Macs. I understand this is a hardware driver issue, and if you have a older Mac it may still work for you.

The free Mouse Locator was mentioned by @mateusz-szlosek. It does what you want, but has limited configuration and the style a bit unpolished.

The most sophisticated option is Mouseposé which is a polished application with very nice animation effects for highlighting the mouse. It has many other features which are very useful during presentations or creating screencasts such as effects on clicking buttons and displaying keystrokes on the screen. Check out their video to see what it can do.

Answer 6

Mouseposé

Mouseposè will highlight the cursor using a customisable dimming of the rest of the screen, and can zoom to the cursor's location.

Of course, there are other uses as well. If you have a large screen, it helps you quickly locate the mouse pointer when you return to your work after an interruption. Visually impaired people tell us that it helps them as well.

Answer 7

I have found PinPoint for OS X. This is what I asked for.

Answer 8

Find My Mouse

Have troubles with finding Mouse(Cursor) on your screen?

This app can easily locate mouse position, and help you to move cursor between multiple displays immediately by one shortcut!

Answer 9

Simple Mouse Locator

I searched the App store (I was actually hoping this was something included in OSX) but this is EXACTLY what I was looking for.

I looked at the other apps (but did not install).

I appreciate all the help and hope that this will help some other person having similar problems.

Answer 10

Idea! It works on every version of OS X, for free!

cmd+scroll

OS X will zoom the whole screen in, centering it on the mouse. The cursor becomes huge and everything else around it will just fly outside the display.

Answer 11

You can checkout Presentify on the Mac App Store. It not only highlights the mouse/cursor for you but also lets you draw on or annotate any screen.

Demo: https://youtu.be/2WvmLwohIF0
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/presentify/id1507246666
Setapp: https://go.setapp.com/stp285?refAppID=401

Note: Setapp is like Netflix for apps. You pay a monthly subscription fee and access all the apps on its store for free.

Disclosure: I am the developer of this app.

Answer 12

There is also a absolutely free way to do this without any installations.

Open the Accessibility in your system preference and select Display. Now you can scale the mouse pointer to the size you like.

Doing it the Apple way (without some 3d party apps)

Create a script as follows that will toggle your cursor size.

Go to System Preferences / Universal Access and check Enable access for assistive devices, this will let you use AppleScript to query and control the user interface of most Applications.

Go to /Applications / Utilities / AppleScript Editor and paste this code and save it as Application:

tell application "System Preferences"
  reveal anchor "Seeing_Display" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
end tell
tell application "System Events"
  set theSlider to slider "Cursor Size:" of group 1 of window 1 of application process "System Preferences"
  set stash to value of theSlider
  if value of theSlider is 1.0 then
      set value of theSlider to 4.0
  else
      set value of theSlider to 1.0
  end if
  stash
end tell

_{source https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/88276/46541}

• Then there are other solutions like:

myPoint Light S 2.17 07-May-2015

Cursor locator that is highly customizable.

Answer 13

A variation is a utility that will put a circle around the cursor when you shake the mouse. I don't find the built-in facility to be enough; growing the cursor is often not noticeable (to me). I've been using myPoint Light S for years and it's worked great. I recently updated to macOS 10.12.4 and it still works.

Answer 14

Pro Mouse can do the job nicely. Features also seem richer and modern.

Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/pro-mouse/id1505869474?mt=12

Site: http://www.alecsummers.com/portfolio/pro-mouse-for-mac/

---

Simple Mouse Locator, As the name suggests, simple with a good set of settings and can do the job.

Store: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/simple-mouse-locator/id946676425?mt=12

Site: http://www.coderace.net/simplemouselocator/en/index.html

Answer 15

PinPoint (also available in the Mac App Store)

The app provides many cursors and the ability to add others.

It will highlight the cursor on keypress or menu item, or if you just stop moving the cursor for a bit.