How to customize the cursor on Windows 10

Windows 10 has quite a few accessibility features, one of which allows you to improve the visibility of the mouse cursor. Unfortunately, these options have been rigid for all of Windows 10’s lifespan. With Windows 10 1903, that’s changed. You can now freely customize the cursor on Windows 10. You can change its size to however big or small you want it to be, and you can set it to any color of your choice.

Customize the cursor

To customize the cursor on Windows 10, open the Settings app and go to the Ease of Access group of settings. Select the Cursor & pointer tab and you will see a new pointer size slider. This slider lets you freely change the size of the cursor. If you play with the slider, you’ll see that the cursor can get quite bit. In screenshots though, the cursor appears at its smallest size.

To change the color of the cursor, click the little color wheel and cursor button. You will see a few color presets appear and these will all be highlight colors as shown in the screenshot below.

Select any one of them and the color of the cursor will change. If the colors don’t work for you, click the ‘Pick a custom pointer color’ button. You will see a full color spectrum where you can pick a color for the cursor.

Again, the color of the cursor won’t be captured in screenshots. When you select a color for the cursor, it does not retain it’s context aware color changing feature which only works when the cursor is black/white and moving on a black/white background. The cursor will still have a black outline and the bigger the cursor is, the outline will be somewhat thicker.

While this is still an accessibility feature, there’s no denying that you can use it as part of your desktop theme. The cursor color won’t save with a desktop theme but getting it to match the accent color on Windows 10 is going to be really easy.

As with any OS level customization feature, it’s better than anything a third-party app would add. It will not consume an unusual amount of system resources. If you’re using it to customize your system, it’s up to you to make it look good. If you’ve had problems working with the default cursor options, you’ll find that the new feature is very accommodating. Microsoft has shown foresight by offering presets that are easy to see.