Changing The Pointer Size and Color On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to change the size and color of the pointer on your Mac to make it easier to see.

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So the pointer is this little arrow that you see in the middle of my screen here. It sometimes is called the cursor but technically cursor is the term applied to that line you use when you're typing text in a word processor. So if you have ever wanted to change the size or color of the pointer there's a way to do that. 

I'm using macOS Monterey. You go into System Preferences and then to Accessibility and then go to Display and then click on Pointer. It's a little tricky because further down in Accessibility there's actually Pointer Control. But what we want is to change how the pointer looks. Not how it works. So here in Display, Pointer you have a few options. The really handy one to know is Shake mouse pointer to locate. So this is what happens when you quickly move the pointer back and forth either using your mouse or the trackpad. You could see it increases in size temporarily. So if you usually don't have any trouble except that every once in a while you loose the position of the pointer on the screen a quick little shake will show you where it is. But if you find that activates sometimes with just your regular mouse movement then you may want to turn that Off. 

Now to change the size you could see here it's pretty simple. There's a pointer size control right here. So you can go from normal all the way up to large. You can see how much larger the pointer gets. The actual spot that you're using to click on things is still at the very tip of that. It's just a much larger pointer now. In addition you can also change the outline color here. So I'll click on this and you could see the Color Picker comes up. So you can use any one of the parts of the Color Picker to change the color. I'll make the outline red. You could see now it's red. You could also change the Fill color by clicking here and then selecting a color like that. So now you can see I've got red and green. 

It's handy to use these to change the color to be something that is kind of opposed to what it is you're using normally. So, for instance, if you find yourself working on graphics that are always very dark and you find the black pointer is getting lost a lot then you can always change to some other color or maybe even make it white like that and have the outline color be something else, either black or whatever. So you can change this to whatever you want. You can always get back to the standard white, black by clicking on Reset here and, of course, changing the pointer size to normal.

I should point out that if you want to change the pointer in a more dramatic way you can find a variety of apps that can help you do that. Search for Mouse Pointer in the App Store. You're going to find a variety of different apps that allow you to magnify under the pointer or change the shape or color or all sorts of other aspects of the pointer. So take a look there if you really need something else. 

I also want to point out how I get the little red circles to appear every time I click in these videos. I know people are going to ask me this. You can see it here when I click. These actually are done after the fact. I'm not seeing them right now. But in ScreenFlow, the app I use to produce these videos, that's one of the options I can add during editing.

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.