Invert Text Cursor Colour

[Graeme]

A friend has accidently inverted his Text Cursor colour from black to white and now can't see the text cursor against a white background!

Is there a short cut for this that he may have inadvertently invoked?

I've looked in Accessibility (Ease of Access) but all you can do there is change the width or add coloured indicators.

Cheers

Graeme

[Jay Freedman]

I don't know how that could happen accidentally. but this should fix it... assuming Win11 hasn't changed the UI that I see in Win10.

If the Control Panel is available, click the Mouse icon. Or press WinKey+I to open the Settings page, click Devices and then Mouse in the left column, then the link "Additional mouse options" under "Related Settings".

Once you get to the Mouse Properties dialog, click the Pointers tab. Scroll down and click on "Text Select".

1.png

Click the Browse button. It should open the file list of the Cursors folder (a subfolder of C:\Windows). Scroll down to the files that start with "beam" and select one. Probably beam_r.cur is the one you want.

2.png

Click Open. Returned to the Mouse Properties dialog, click Apply and test the result in a text editor. If you don't like it, click Browse again and choose a different file.

[Graeme]

Thanks Jay

That works, I have a nice fat visible text cursor now!

The problem seemed to be that the old text cursor changed to match the white background and so became invisible. I wondered if there was a shortcut that inverts the colour of the text cursor?

Graeme

[Jay Freedman]

I don't know of any shortcut like that, but there are some weird ones lurking in Windows.

[kdock]

Perhaps it's an undocumented feature. I couldn't find any shortcut that would turn the text cursor white. I did find in Accessibility>Text cursor>Text Cursor thickness the ability to make the cursor wider or narrower. If it's too thin it won't display. Mine was defaulted to 2 and I dragged it to 1 and it disappeared. That seems extreme, but maybe some people don't like the little flashing thing?

Kim

[Graeme]

Thanks Kim.

But I've turned the text cursor into a thick one following Jay's method and even on narrow 1, it's still there.

Sorted

Graeme

[kdock]