Here’s my “lost mouse” solution. Which hasn’t changed since XP and maybe even Win95. And is the “official” MSFT solution.
Go into Settings → Accessibility → Mouse pointer and touch.
About the 4th item down says “Mouse indicator”. Turn that on.
Now when you press the Ctrl key all by itself, a very obvious animation will show you where the mouse pointer is hiding. When I lose my mouse I give a quick double-tap to Ctrl and there it is. Especially handy when you have multiple monitors configured; the animation is big enough you’ll catch it out of the corner of your eye even if you’re looking 2 screens away. Just keep tapping Ctrl until you finally see it.
If, like I do, you also have the mouse pointer configured to disappear in a keyboard input box, the Ctrl key animation will still reveal its (otherwise invisible) location.
I know your recently did a switch to Linux on one machine. I don’t know how it works in say gnome, but in KDE I just wiggle it a bunch and the mouse pointer becomes bigger temporarily. I did not have adjust any settings or anything for this to occur. It just works out of the box so to speak.
I haven’t yet lost the pointer on that laptop. I now have four laptops. My “main” laptop (a Mac), my travel laptop (Linux), my gaming laptop (Windows), and my work laptop (Windows). It’s the work laptop where I’ve been losing the pointer recently. I’m thinking i should maybe make it a little more visible.
For me at least, I don’t like a big clunky crude mouse pointer when I’m already tracking it with my eyes; something small and delicate is better for precision pointing. But then it’s small enough to get lost. Hence my preference for turning on the “highlight my mouse position” feature.
Ref @EinsteinsHund, yes, often just waggling the mouse in a circle draws enough attention to it; especially on single-screen installations. But the “hit Ctrl to make it super-obvious even to folks with low vision” is the “nuke it from orbit” solution to lost mouse pointers. And therefore handy to have already teed up in reserve.
With the explosion of tablets & laptops w touchpads, mice may actually be an invention whose days as a mainstream consumer product are numbered.
Like digitizing tablets and pucks w reticules, they might become the near-exclusive province of higher end graphics designers, not ordinary office or home computer users.
That’s some serious hyperbole. I exclusively use a touchpad and I have never had a problem. I get that they don’t work for you and that’s fine but I don’t see how the one that I have on my cheapie HP laptop could be any better.
I was totally in camp @Atamasama for a couple decades: touchpads suck; mice FTW!!
Somehow I overcame that and now happily touchpad while only rarely firing up a mouse.
For sure it depends a lot on what sort of work you typically are doing. I’d hate to be a graphics designer trying to select pixels w a touchpad. For more text / keystroke-heavy work, the reduced time moving between keyboard and touchpad vs keyboard and mouse feels like a material gain to me.
Reminds me of my reaction to touchscreens:
Dumb idea; who’d want that?
OK, I’ll use it occasionally.
WTF, how come your computer doesn’t have a touchscreen?
Just yesterday I was assisting GF on her older Mac laptop. I must have poked that screen with a finger a dozen times. Didn’t accomplish a thing except raise my blood pressure.
Without a doubt there are plenty of use cases where a mouse would be superior but not so much for just basic uses.
When I was in an office and used a mouse on a tower PC, I would switch my mousing hand every year or two. It didn’t take long to be completely used to it. use two hands for typing and my right index for mousing on a pad.
I’m apparently fat fingered. On a touchpad I very often wind up doing something entirely different than I had in mind, either because I touched the thing right next to what I was aiming at or because I fractionally moved my finger sideways while doing so or held it in place fractionally too long or not long enough.
Also sometimes the touchpad just doesn’t want to recognize my finger. That, I suppose, might be a problem with the device; but the other problems seem innate to the way touchscreens work.
I feel like there’s always, at least for the foreseeable future, going to be enough people that use a computer at a desk and want a real keyboard and a real mouse. I go back and forth between my mouse and keyboard all day and, at least while sitting at a desk, I’d prefer a real mouse.
Someone mentioned graphic design. On the rare occasion that I do anything like that, sometimes I have to wait until I’m at work so I can use a mouse instead of the touchpad on my laptop at home. Trying to, for example, hold down Shift and a mouse button and move the mouse gets difficult.
I have a bad habit of letting my palm hit the touchpad. That’s bad enough when it moves the cursor and I find myself typing somewhere else. It’s even worse when I accidentally highlight a section of what I’m tying and it all disappears as soon as I hit a key.
Interestingly, I have just as bad of a habit of bumping the screen on my laptop and screwing things up. 90% of the time, I accidentally bump the X in the upper right hand corner and close whatever I was using. I now disable touchscreens or, whenever possible, get laptops that don’t have them.
It is not. I support over 100 laptop users and that is a strong concensus. That is my professional experience, not just a personal opinion.
Not to mention that touchpads have been around for decades, which is like centuries in the computer world. If they were going to replace mice, it would have happened long ago. The suggestion that it will happen now is delusional.
It’s far more likely that touch screens will make touchpads obsolete, the same way button mice were phased out as touchpads replaced them. I wouldn’t count on that either, but it’s more likely.
Touchpads won’t replace mice for the same reason that a virtual on-screen keyboard won’t completely replace a physical keyboard. (Although that has already happened somewhat, as smart phones haven’t had physical keyboards for a long time.)
Aside from how clunky and unappealing they are, many people physically cannot use a touchpad for long without developing serious hand issues.
Mice aren’t going anywhere until something actually better comes along.
I now have four laptops. My “main” laptop (a Mac), my travel laptop (Linux), my gaming laptop (Windows), and my work laptop (Windows). It’s the work laptop where I’ve been losing the pointer recently. I’m thinking i should maybe make it a little more visible.
