I’ve tried several ways to keep track of my mouse pointer.  It’s kind of hard from time to time.  Adding more than one monitor does not help at all!

Recently a colleague gave me the tip to make the mouse pointer black… and larger. I tried this and found that the mouse pointer was much easier to spot.  No surprise there, really.  After all, white on white tends to become a bit hard to keep track of, tiny silhouette outline or not.

I was told how to do this in Windows (Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer, but that’s another story).

In Gnome (I’m running Ubuntu 8.10) you do it in the System > Preferences > Appearance dialog (see below).  In my version of Window’s there’s no settings under Appearance > Mouse.

Next you click the “Customize” button:

In the new dialog select the “Pointer”-tab and select the color of pointer you want.  In order to resize it, see the “size slider” below the list of pointers (there seems to be three distinct sizes to choose from).

Click “Close” once you’re done, and voila, you have a new and much easier to spot mouse pointer!