Change cursor size on a Mac so the pointer stops disappearing

The pointer is the smallest thing on the screen and the only thing that has to be found instantly. On a large display, or on a MacBook driving a second screen, it is a thin arrow a few pixels wide that can sit on top of a dark video, a code editor, or a photo, and simply not register. Losing it for two seconds, twenty times a day, is the actual complaint behind the search for a bigger cursor.

Making it bigger is one of five separate controls that all get described as making things easier to see, and they are not interchangeable. Two of them are in Accessibility, one is in Displays, and the one that solves the problem for most people is a color picker rather than a slider. Sorting out which lever matches which complaint takes about five minutes and does not need to be undone later.

The slider is in Accessibility, not in Mouse settings

Almost everything else about the pointer is in System Settings under Mouse or Trackpad: tracking speed, scroll direction, double-click speed. Pointer size is not there, which is why it is so often reported as missing.

Apple documents one location for it.

On your Mac, choose Apple menu > System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, then click Display. (You may need to scroll down.) Go to Pointer, then set any of these options. Source: support.apple.com, read September 27, 2026

The Pointer group holds five controls, and it is worth knowing all of them before touching any:

• Shake mouse pointer to locate, which Apple describes as making "the pointer larger when you quickly move your finger on the trackpad or quickly move the mouse".
• Pointer size, a slider with no numbers on it. The instruction is to "drag the slider until the pointer size is right for you".
• Pointer outline color, a color well for "a color for the pointer's outline".
• Pointer fill color, a color well for "a color for the inside of the pointer".
• Reset Colors, which restores "the default pointer outline color (white) and fill color (black)".

The size slider is a system setting, not a per app one, so the change applies everywhere the standard pointer is drawn. There is no separate control for making the pointer large in one app and normal in another.

The usual mistake is to drag the slider a long way on the first attempt. A pointer at three or four times its default size is easy to spot and starts to cover the thing it is pointing at, which matters when the target is a small close button or a narrow scroll bar. Half a step is usually enough to change how long the eye takes to find it.

The setting that is often being looked for instead

Accessibility settings also include a Display section with a Text size slider, and a Displays panel with a Larger Text option. Neither of those touches the pointer. The four levers are covered further down, because reaching for the wrong one is the most common reason people conclude that nothing changed.

Color does more work than size

The default pointer is a black arrow with a white outline. That combination is designed to survive on both light and dark backgrounds, and most of the time it does. It fails in a specific case: content with strong local contrast, such as a dark terminal window with white text, a photo with bright highlights against shadow, or a video with subtitles. In those places the black fill disappears into the dark area and the white outline disappears into the light one, and there is no moment where the whole shape is visible at once.

Changing the fill to a color that appears nowhere in the content fixes exactly that. A saturated color holds its shape against black and white alike, because it is not competing on brightness. The pointer stays the same size, so it still covers as little as before, and it becomes findable without a shake or a hunt.

The outline is the part to leave alone in most cases. A white outline is what separates the pointer from dark backgrounds, and replacing it with another color often makes the shape harder to read rather than easier. Changing the fill and keeping the outline white is the cheaper change of the two.

Reset Colors exists for the case where experimenting has gone too far, and it is worth knowing it is there before starting. It returns both wells to white outline and black fill in one click, so there is no need to remember the original values or to guess at which shade of black was in use.

One practical note on color and size together: they solve different halves of the problem. Size shortens the time needed to notice the pointer anywhere on the screen. Color shortens the time needed to pick it out from whatever is underneath it. Someone who loses the pointer on a busy screen needs color. Someone who loses it because the screen is physically large needs size. Doing both at once makes it impossible to tell which one worked.

Shake to locate handles a different problem entirely

The shake setting is not a size setting, even though it changes size. It is a gesture that temporarily enlarges the pointer when the mouse or the trackpad finger is moved quickly, then lets it return to normal. Apple lists it in the same Pointer group as the size slider, and the two work independently.

That distinction matters because the two complaints behind the search are different. "The pointer is too small to see comfortably" is a permanent condition and calls for the slider. "The pointer is somewhere on this screen and finding it takes a second" is an occasional event and calls for the shake. Turning on the shake costs nothing in normal use, because the pointer stays at its usual size until a deliberate fast movement.

The case where shake earns its place is multiple displays. A pointer that was last used on a second screen, or that has drifted onto a display in a different position, is not slow to see so much as slow to locate, and a quick wiggle answers the question without scanning three screens. The same applies after waking a Mac, where the pointer often sits wherever it was left rather than where attention is.

Shake also has a side effect worth knowing about. Because it triggers on fast movement, it can fire during ordinary quick gestures, briefly inflating the pointer when nothing was being looked for. For most people that is harmless. For anyone recording the screen or presenting, it is a reason to turn it off before starting, since a pointer that grows and shrinks on camera reads as a glitch.

Five levers, five different problems

Requests to make things bigger on a Mac land on five different settings. Only the first one changes the pointer.

What to change	Where it lives	What it actually enlarges
Pointer size	Accessibility, then Display, then Pointer	the pointer, and nothing else
Text size	Accessibility, then Display, then Text size	text across multiple apps, plus text and icons on the desktop and in sidebars
Zoom	Accessibility, then Zoom	the whole screen, or an adjustable onscreen lens over part of it
Larger Text in Displays	System Settings, then Displays, then Larger Text	everything, by lowering the resolution from the one macOS chose
Hover Text	Accessibility, then Hover Text	a large copy of the text or icon currently under the pointer

Apple's own summary of the resolution option is the one to read carefully before using it: "Your Mac automatically uses the best resolution for your display, but you can reduce the resolution to make everything on the screen appear larger." That is a trade, not a free improvement. Everything grows, including the pointer, and less fits on the screen.

Hover Text is the least known of the five and the closest fit for a common case. It shows an enlarged copy of whatever the pointer is over, which answers "the label is too small to read" without changing anything about the layout. Zoom, by contrast, is the right answer when the problem is a region of the screen rather than a single label, and it can be driven from the keyboard once the shortcut option is turned on.

Mixing these is what produces the report that the pointer did not change. Text size and Larger Text are convincing enough that they feel like they should have covered the pointer too, and they do not.

When the pointer is easy to see and still hard to land

A visible pointer that is hard to place is a separate problem, and it has its own settings in Accessibility under Pointer Control.

Mouse Keys turns the keyboard into the pointing device. With it on, the 7, 8, 9, U, O, J, K and L keys move the pointer, the I key clicks, M holds the button down, and the period key releases it. On a keyboard with a numeric keypad the equivalents are 7, 8, 9, 4, 6, 1, 2, 3 for movement, 5 for a click, 0 to hold and the period key to release. Apple attaches one warning to it that decides whether it is usable day to day: "When Mouse Keys is on, you can't use the keyboard or numeric keypad to enter text."

That makes Mouse Keys a tool for a specific task rather than a permanent mode for most people. It is genuinely useful for placing the pointer on a small target precisely, and impossible to leave on while writing.

Alternate pointer actions, in the same Pointer Control section, is the broader version. Apple describes using "keyboard shortcuts, assistive switches, or facial expressions to perform mouse actions, such as left, right, or double clicks", turned on with the "Alternate pointer actions" switch. Anyone whose real difficulty is the click rather than the aim should look there before enlarging anything.

Small targets at the top of the screen

There is one place where a larger pointer reliably fails to help, and it is the row of icons at the top right of the screen. Menu bar icons are small, mostly monochrome, and mostly the same size as each other, which means the bottleneck is telling them apart rather than hitting them. A pointer at double size arrives no faster at the right one.

Menu Bar settings is where that gets fixed instead of worked around. macOS lets each of the standard status items be shown or hidden there, including Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Battery, Focus, Screen Mirroring, Display, Sound, Now Playing and Fast User Switching. Several of them take a pop-up menu with two options that are worth knowing: "Show When Active: Only show the status icon in the menu bar when the item is active" and "Always Show: Show the status icon in the menu bar at all times". Switching an item to show only when active removes it from the row for most of the day without giving up access to it.

Third party apps that live in the menu bar are the part macOS does not manage. They do not appear in Menu Bar settings, they arrive in whatever order they launched, and they are the reason the row keeps growing. A menu bar manager for macOS exists for that half of the problem, and the features page describes what can be hidden, revealed on demand, or kept permanently visible. Which of those tools keep working when the row is collapsed differs between them, and how it compares sets out the differences that matter in daily use.

What to change first

Open Accessibility, then Display, then Pointer, and change the fill color before touching the slider. If the pointer is still hard to find after that, add half a step of size and turn on shake to locate, in that order. If the thing being hunted for is a specific icon at the top of the screen rather than the pointer itself, the size of the pointer was never the problem, and Koffret is aimed at that row instead.