Ever lose your mouse cursor? Itโ€™s not hard to do when youโ€™ve sitting in front of multiple monitors or perhaps a super-ultrawide or maybe even a monstrous TV โ€” but Microsoft has an amazing keyboard shortcut that can instantly surface your cursor, and I recently found it purely by accident.

I was tapping away on my keyboard when all of a sudden my screens dimmed โ€” except for one tiny disc of light. It turns out Iโ€™d accidentally double-pressed Ctrl, which triggers the Find My Mouse feature in Microsoftโ€™s excellent optional PowerToys.

Hereโ€™s what that looks like up close:

GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Find My Mouse in action.

And hereโ€™s a rough idea of what it looks like with my triple-monitor rig:

GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Sorry about the lower quality; I should have turned off HDR video on my phone.

For something so simple, itโ€™s incredibly effective โ€” the spotlight instantly draws my attention to where my cursor is, the dimming effect makes it perfectly clear where it isnโ€™t. As someone who used to wildly wag my mouse cursor around to find it across three screens, Iโ€™m finding it coming in handy almost every day.

My only question is: why isnโ€™t this built into Windows 11? For now, youโ€™ll have to download and install PowerToys from GitHub if you want it. Iโ€™m a big fan; Iโ€™ve used its highly customizable FancyZones window manager to snap windows into perfectly sized positions across my screens for well over a year now.

The Find My Mouse feature doesnโ€™t require any additional setup, as I accidentally discovered myself. As long as PowerToys is up and running at startup, double-tapping Ctrl should do it. Microsoftโ€™s support page does show a few ways to tweak it, though.

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