Ever lose your mouse cursor? Itโs not hard to do when youโve 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 Iโd accidentally double-pressed Ctrl, which triggers the Find My Mouse feature in Microsoftโs excellent optional PowerToys.
Hereโs what that looks like up close:
GIF by Sean Hollister / The Verge
Find My Mouse in action.
And hereโs 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, itโs incredibly effective โ the spotlight instantly draws my attention to where my cursor is, the dimming effect makes it perfectly clear where it isnโt. As someone who used to wildly wag my mouse cursor around to find it across three screens, Iโm finding it coming in handy almost every day.
My only question is: why isnโt this built into Windows 11? For now, youโll have to download and install PowerToys from GitHub if you want it. Iโm a big fan; Iโve 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 doesnโt 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. Microsoftโs support page does show a few ways to tweak it, though.