The cursor sometimes gets camouflaged with the screen, and is difficult to locate right? Do you ever wish if your cursor was a bit colorful or bigger in size or maybe you can add a cursor highlighter to locate it easily? Sure you can make the cursor big, thicker, add a keyboard shortcut to locate, give it a color, etc; but well, PenAttention does more than that! It’s a very simple free utility that highlights your cursor. Furthermore, you can adjust the settings and change the highlight color and size. Let’s learn more about it.
Mouse Pointer & Cursor Highlighter for PC
It’s a very lightweight and simple cursor highlighter that takes a few minutes to download and install on your PC. Once installed, you will see a small pink icon on your system tray. Right-click on the icon and you can see the options available. You can either select your highlighter as a circle/rectangle or as a pencil/pointer.
How to use PenAttention
The application is pretty simple and you can use it without any particular tech knowledge. Right-click on the icon in your system tray and go to Highlight Settings.
- Here you can select if you want the highlight to be circular or rectangular in shape.
- You can adjust and select the opacity of the highlighter.
- You can also change the color of the highlighter as per your own choice. Just click on the three tiny dots on the color block and select your color.
- When done with the adjustments, click on the box saying ‘Highlight mouse as well as pen‘ and click on Apply Changes. Well, the checkbox is so tiny that you might miss it, as I did initially, hence I’ve added the arrows to help you out. Alternatively, you can also check the box saying ‘Toggle Color On Right Click‘ if you want to change the color of your highlighter frequently in a single click.
Hotkey Highlight Toggle
The highlighter after a point might get bothering, so you can use the Hotkeys to toggle it. This is a nice feature wherein you can turn the Highlighter On or Off with just the hotkeys. Select your preferred Hotkey CTRL+ F9 or CTRL+ALT+F9 and you are done.
So, basically its a free utility which is very useful for people like me who often struggle to find the cursor lost somewhere in the text. Also, it is pretty useful for people who often have to share the screen for work. They can easily highlight the cursor in the shared screen and make the work easier.
The only issue with this application is that it doesn’t integrate well with the Windows 10 scaling. I have bad eyesight and thus keep my display scaled to 125% and this application, Pen Attention doesn’t really work well with that. The highlighter just detaches from the cursor if your display is scaled above 100%. Check the image below to understand it better.
Do you need PenAttention?
- Yes if you often struggle to locate the cursor.
- Yes if you often share your screen for work.
- Yes if you often need to take screenshots and mark them.
Overall, it is a nice simple and free utility to highlight the cursor but for me, but I wish it could work well with 125% of scaling. For me, I would rather opt with my 125% scaled display and skip this utility. You can download it here if you find it useful.
