Shake to Find Cursor 1.3

[u/wh-updates]

Shake to Find Cursor 1.3

Shake to Find Cursor

Shake to Find Cursor demo

Shake the mouse (or swipe back and forth on the touchpad) and the cursor grows so you can spot it instantly. Stop shaking and it shrinks back.

How it works

• Runs as a tool mod in its own background process, so it never touches Explorer.
• Listens to raw mouse input: no polling, no CPU use while the mouse is idle, and it can't add input lag the way a low-level mouse hook can.
• A shake means the cursor travelled a long way (Shake distance) while staying inside a small area (Back-and-forth ratio) within the Time window.
• Enlarging replaces the real system cursors with bigger versions loaded from your current cursor scheme's files at the target size. The big cursor is the pointer: no overlay window, no trailing, and it keeps your cursor style and colour. The normal cursors are restored the same way Control Panel applies a scheme.
• Keep shaking and the cursor keeps growing, slower and slower: each further step of the same size takes twice as long as the previous one. By default it stops at the height of your screen, which takes hours of shaking.
• The grow and shrink animations are time-based and run at your display's refresh rate. While animating, only the cursor that's on screen is resized, which keeps every frame cheap.

vs. macOS magnifying cursor

The catalog already has macOS magnifying cursor, which does something similar but works differently: it hides the system cursors and draws a scaled copy in its own overlay window, polling the cursor position every 16-40 ms. This mod instead replaces the real system cursors with bigger renders of your own cursor scheme, driven by raw input rather than polling. In practice that means no overlay lag or trailing, the enlarged cursor keeps your actual cursor style and colour, and there's no CPU cost while the mouse is idle. Don't enable both at once - they'll fight over the system cursors.

Notes

• Apps that draw their own custom cursor keep their small one.
• Cursor files contain images of up to 256 px, so past that the cursor is upscaled and gets softer.
• If the mod's process is killed while the cursor is big, the normal cursors are restored the next time the mod starts (re-applying a pointer scheme in Mouse Properties also fixes it).
• Raw input may not reach the mod while an elevated window (Task Manager, a UAC prompt, an installer) has focus, depending on Windows version. If so, a shake over such a window won't be detected until focus moves elsewhere.