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I am visually impaired, and find it really difficult to locate the mouse pointer on screen. (I am running Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS) Other OS's have built-in methods to make the mouse pointer more easily visible. In Windows you can turn on "pointer trails" where moving the pointer will leave a trail of pointer images making it easier to visually track/follow the pointer. (I nicknamed them "mouse droppings" ;-) ) And in MacOS Sierra, Apple added a feature whereby if you jiggle the mouse pointer (move it back and forth rapidly) it will temporarily enlarge the mouse pointer, again to make it easier to see on screen. Is there a similar feature (either built-in or provided by a third-party app) for Ubuntu?

Organic Marble
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Donald Burr
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2 Answers2

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It's not an obvious setting, but you can mimic the Windows behavior of showing the mouse when you press the control key.

For GNOME based environments

In the terminal, do

# Ubuntu 19.10+
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface locate-pointer true

older versions


gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse locate-pointer true

Now a little animation will indicate the location of the mouse anytime you tap the Control key:

control key animation

(To turn it off, use false instead of true)

(Source)

KDE

In KDE, go to System Settings -> Desktop Effects -> Track Mouse. Click on the cog icon beside that, and set Ctrl as the modifier key.

icc97
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Nonny Moose
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    No such key “locate-pointer” :( ubuntu 19.10 – Mickey Perlstein Mar 15 '20 at 13:56
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    @MickeyPerlstein It looks like the command has been changed to gsettings org.gnome.desktop.interface locate-pointer true in Ubuntu 20.04. However, I can not seem it get this feature working in Ubuntu 20.04. – GSM-S May 13 '20 at 16:51
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    gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface locate-pointer true bad key in ubuntu 18.04 LTS – Mickey Perlstein May 13 '20 at 17:17
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    @GSM-S It only works with left ctrl. – Nonny Moose May 13 '20 at 20:57
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    No such key “locate-pointer” and "Unknown command org.gnome.desktop.interface"

     – Snowcrash Oct 30 '20 at 12:50
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    I'm on Fedora but using Gnome 3 so it ought to be the same. Rather than messing around with gsettings on the command line, you can go into Control Panel -> Accessibility and under 'Pointing & Clicking' turn on 'Locate Pointer'. [edit] I'm not visually impaired but run my mouse cursor is so small across my 4k and 1080p monitors that I frequently lose my mouse cursor :) – Neek Feb 15 '21 at 01:47
  • The gsettings change does something (and is reflected in the Keyboard & Mouse > Pointer Location toggle in Tweaks), but the animation is very fast, and the circle it makes is only a couple dozen pixels wide, so it's invisible. So I wrote my own: https://gist.github.com/tsbertalan/666cf32a12f7f1e60ddd0e20cf4746a1 – tsbertalan Oct 17 '22 at 21:48
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You can do this by enabling Show mouse plugin from CompizConfig Settings manager. If you don't have them already installed, you can install them from terminal using the following command:

sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager compiz-plugins-extra

After are installed, open CompizConfig Settings manager and enable Show mouse plugin. To initiate it use Super+K key combination.

This answer is from here. I recommend checking the link (I can't embed images, which is why I recommend checking the link).

Mark
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