I constantly lose the cursor on my Mac screen. I have a big iMac but it’s really frustrating when I have to just randomly move the cursor around until I see it. Is there some easy way to make the cursor in MacOS X bigger?
There are many elements of a modern computer interface that were originally designed for lower resolution monitors. Nowadays we have monitors that can have thousands of pixels horizontally and vertically meaning that they are millions of dots on the screen. It’s no surprise that people end up losing their cursor when the screen becomes that big! And then we have to think of the physical size of the screen to: you can now get monitors that are 24 inches or even bigger! That’s a lot of screen to look at to find a little tiny cursor.
Certainly on the Windows side there are third party extensions that promise to make your cursor bigger and even more fun, but you don’t really want to use those as often they’re malware too. Bad. On the Mac side there aren’t so many extensions (because Apple knows it’s a dangerous tweak) but there are some really useful settings in Accessibility that will help you become one with your on-screen cursor again!
To start out, let’s play a quick game of where’s the cursor?
It’s a bit tricky to see in my image, isn’t it?
Turns out that by default, Macs have a nifty feature called “shake mouse pointer to locate” which is best demonstrated with a tiny video:
You can try that on your computer too: Instead of just moving your cursor around the screen, move it back and forth like you’re scribbling on a piece of paper. It should enlarge for just a moment or two.
To actually make your cursor bigger all the time, however, go into System Preferences (off the Apple menu on the top left of your screen) and locate Accessibility:
Click on it, click on the “Cursor” tab along the top and you’ll immediately see the option for that “Shake mouse pointer to locate” feature along with a slider that lets you adjust cursor size:
Definitely enable the shake feature as it basically lurks in the background until you need it.
But what about cursor size? Well, move the slider and you’ll see, it can get pretty big:
That big cursor? It’s really big! But you can also just choose to have it a little big bigger, as I have done. This means that when it comes to the where’s Waldo quiz, it’s hopefully just a little bit easier to find the cursor:
And that’s how you can change the cursor to meet your own needs on your Mac. Note that you can tweak and try out different size cursors all you want, so if it still isn’t sufficient help, go and make it just a little bit bigger yet. Too big? Make it smaller.
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about the Mac and MacOS X for a long time. Please check out my extensive (book length!) Mac help area for lots of tutorials and help articles about your favorite operating system!