You Can Make Your Cursor Easier to Spot in Windows

It happens to the best of us: You’re working on your computer, when all of a sudden, you can’t find the cursor. You move your mouse or trackpad all over the place, but, for some reason, the cursor is just…gone. Eventually, of course, you find it, but by then, you’ve lost valuable time (and energy).

It doesn’t have to be this way. Your cursor is actually highly customizable, allowing you to adjust it to whatever shape or size you wish. But more than that, you can deliberately choose to make your cursor visible no matter the circumstance: Whether your cursor is resting on a dark or light portion of your display, you’ll always be able to see at least part of it with this trick. Here’s what to know:

To get started, open Settings in the Start menu, then head to Accessibility. Here, choose “Mouse pointer and touch,” then take a look at the different cursor style options. The first two are self-explanatory: You can make your cursor always white, or always black. But there’s another option here, that shows a square that’s half-white and half-black, with a cursor that is the opposite. This is the “Inverted” cursor option, which automatically turns your cursor the inverted color of the display element it happens to be over at any given moment.

If your cursor is over a bright white image, it will turn black; if it’s over a dark black image, it will turn white. This works with colors as well: If it’s over a green image, it’ll turn red; if it’s over an orange image, it’ll turn blue. The idea is, no matter where the cursor is, it’ll always turn the exact color it needs to to be instantly spottable.

You can take other steps in this Settings page to make your cursor more visible, like making it larger, adding “trails” as you move, or having the cursor reveal itself when you press Ctrl.