Help with Windows 11 mouse pointer, please?

Factual Questions
1

Hi. I just jumped from W7 to W11, and I’m going nuts trying to change some things to look/act more like I’m used to. (Evidentially MS wants me to change, I’m resisting.)

Current worst peeve is with the mouse pointer. I’ve found the mouse and text pointer sections under ‘personalization’, also looked at ‘accessibility’, and can’t seem to find any way to fix what bothers me. What am I overlooking, or is it simply impossible?

Here’s what I see when browsing the web, using either Chrome or Firefox, so I think it must be windows and not a browser based thing:

While on a page, if the mouse pointer is in an empty area, it’s a little white arrow head looking thing. Fine.

When it is on a link it turns into a hand pointing with one finger. Fine. (BTW, are those hands always white? Hmm. Nevermind, not the current point.)

But when the pointer is on a line of text, it turns into this gawd-awful ugly thing that looks like a kid drew a Capital “I” with a sharpie. Hideous.

Please, can I change that? How?

BTW, I’m not talking about the text cursor, like you get when you type in text boxes. That’s just a simple line. (Well, mine currently has little purple blobs on the top and bottom of it, but that was deliberate experimentation and I know where/how to change that back if I want.) I’m talking about, well, on the page where I’m entering this message right now, if I point at the lines saying “Create a new Topic” or “Your topic is similar to…” both get the hideous pointer version.

Help me, Obi wan.

2
3

The only way to set individual cursors is with the old-fashioned Windows 7 Control Panel Mouse options, which fortunately still exist in Windows 11.

Go to Settings > Bluetooth and Devices > Mouse, and click Additional Mouse Settings (under Related Settings). From there, click on the Pointers tab, and you will see the various cursors under the Customize section. Scroll until Text Select appears. The Browse button will let you change the cursor.

The usual text cursors have a name starting with the word “beam.”

4

One of my biggest gripes with Win11 is that they removed any built-in way to ungroup icons in the task bar. When I’m flipping back and forth between multiple instances of the same program (ie several spreadsheets, a regular and incognito browser etc) it’s a nightmare.
I know there’s a few third party options, but I’d prefer not to pay for something to find out it doesn’t work the way I want it to work.
They must have entirely removed the feature, otherwise I would have thought there would at least be something in the registry that could be changed to enable it.

5

The different shapes are to indicate different functions that are available for the cursor in different situations. When your cursor is over text, the shape of the cursor indicates that you can highlight and copy text (as I just did with this part of your post). I’m very used to seeing the capital Roman letter i for that purpose. What did your old cursor in this context look like?

6

The capital “I” mouse cursor over selectable text has been standard Windows appearance since version 1.0.

7

You are wonderful! Just exactly what I wanted, and with the steps all laid out. If I had any gold stars, I’d give you a whole handful.

Maybe it sounds silly, but I just HATED that beam thing: way too large and dark, and so wide it often made it hard to make out the letter it was on. Just what you don’t want when trying to proofread. Now I have a decently thin bar with little arrow heads top and bottom, that only could possibly block a lower case i.

Whoa, looks like something I might want to try out, once I have some other more urgent problems the swapped computers has created.

Truthfully, I don’t know? I mean, I only stared at it for about 10 years… I suspect it may have been a Capital I, just it wasn’t so in-your-face about it. The one it defaulted to is too large, too heavy, and the upright stem is a double line, and it just looks awkward and childish and clumsy to my eyes.

Among the zillion options that BigT’s method offered me were some “I” ones I could have lived with, but I really like the thinnish line with arrowhead top and bottom one. They block the least in the ‘middle’ area where much of the differentiation between letters shows best.

8

Glad you were able to get something you can live with. My version is made of fairly thin lines, and even then it can block enough of a letter that I have to move it out of the way.

9

There’s an add-on called ExplorerPatcher* which essentially restores the Win11 taskbar to Win10 functionality, including (but not limited to) icon grouping. I installed it primarily to enable another program to display the system clock the way I want it (ddd dd mmm yyyy HH:nn:ss).

* I prefer not to link to application websites, especially when they’re non-US (this one is in Romania).

10

I saw that one as well, I didn’t look that far into it yet.

11

I solved this by making multiple copies of the .exe file for the program I wanted to ungroup when running separate instances. I gave each .exe a unique name in the original program folder. I probably could make start menu shortcuts to each .exe but I was lazy and just made a shortcut to the program folder in favorites and just run them directly by clicking the .exe files.

12

That’s an interesting workaround. I’m surprised it actually works. Or rather, I’m surprised it doesn’t break something else in the process. With how intertwined everything is these days, I would have expected that to cause various programs and/or (even seemingly unrelated) background processes to crash.

13

No, that hand can be different colors (mine happens to be an aqua green color). In Windows 10, it is changed via the personalization menu – I think it’s part of the Accent colors pallet.