PowerToys
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microsoft
Make "Find my mouse" draw the background as a gradient that grows brighter towards the mouse
Description of the new feature / enhancement
This way you can tell INSANTANEOUSLY what direction to move your mouse to get it back to where you need it.
I have twelve high resolution monitors, some of which are not in my immediate field of view. It is very easy to lose the cursor for one reason or another, and the worst case scenario is when it goes out of the field altogether. I'm a day trader and speed matters. Seconds matter. It can literally cost me real money when I can't find my mouse during a big move.
I can only make the cursor so large before it interferes with my ability to work. And no solution centered on the cursor itself solves the problem where I can't find the cursor in the first place, b/c it's out of my field of view.
"Find My Mouse" is a solid step in the right direction, b/c I can tell in a single glance if all the screens in my field of view are dark, and therefore my mouse is somewhere else. Before I had to scan 7 monitors before reaching that conclusion.
Going to a gradient would make the rest a one glance affair; i.e. not only the direction of where my mouse is but which direction to move it to get it back where I need it. Nirvana would finally be achieved.
Thank you for your consideration.
Scenario when this would be used?
All day while I'm day trading.
Supporting information
No response
Have you tried Mouse Pointer Crosshairs yet? That could be useful for this as well.
I started testing that today. It's helpful, but the crosshairs are obviously super costly from a distraction, visual noise and overall weirdness perspective. So I'm skeptical, but still curious to collect the data.
12 monitors, insane! The idea was the motion for the effect would draw your eye.
Glad you dig! Hah. I'd have more, but Windows gets kinda twitchy in unexpected ways as you increase the number.
Just reading some old issues - I had a play with something along these lines in the past but the Find My Mouse code was a bit beyond me so I didn't really get anywhere.
I thought about having chevrons appear alongside the spotlight that pointed toward the mouse - something like this:
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/b7274311-649d-4ebd-8ca4-f125cfd50e2f
or
It would help work out what screen the mouse is on, and as a side effect, you don't even need to find the mouse really - just look where you want it to be and move the mouse in the opposite direction to the chevrons. Move it fast if there's big chevrons, and slow down as they get smaller, which might be helpful to recover it if the current screen is out of line-of-sight.
Yeah that's a really cool/useful idea. Anything to instantly ground the eye and eliminating the "where is it" period.