Ubuntu – Need alternative to Accessibility’s “Locate Pointer” to visually highlight the mouse

10.04accessibilitymouse

A black-on-white cross-hair/I-bar mouse-pointer is sometimes hard foe me to spot in amongst black-on-white text.

I've tried Accessibility / Mouse Accessibility / Locate Pointer
which will: Show pointer position when Control is pressed

It works (to a point), but it does have a notable problem, which renders it impractical.

  • It has the uncanny side-effect of disallowing all Control key navigation while editing a file/dir name in Nautilus F2. Just touching the Control key drops it out of edit mode, which means I can't keyboard paste, move-L/R word etc…

So, I'm looking for an alternative.
I've tried Compiz's Water Effect, but I need something which is sharper, faster, and localized to the pointer.

Compiz's Show Mouse (with fire) is not suitable.

I'm really looking for an analog of "Accessibility / Locate Pointer":
* ie. I hit Control (only).. and it blips a quick visual pulse.

UPDATE:
I've just realized why I can't find my mouse so often!
… It's because it is isn't there !!!
… Two apps I use a lot, Gedit and Konsole (KDE Terminal; it renders unicode better),
… dissolve the mouse-pointer to invisible after the first key is typed … and Konsole does it after a few seconds of idle-time… like a video-player option: "hide the mouse".. Well I don't use the mouse much, and I thought it was juse my eyesight (which does rely a lot on Compiz's zoom)… I discovered it when I installed a "novelty" app, called Geyes from gnome-applets Install gnome-applets ("A goofy set of eyes for the GNOME panel. They follow your mouse.") … It could follow the mouse better than me! 🙂
… Geyes

Best Answer

Maybe you can report an accessibility bug asking for the Ctrl not to be hardcoded, so that you can choose whatever shortcut or unused key you want for it.

Another option might be to ask the Compiz developers to create a less spectacular alternative for their current "find the pointer" effects.

As an alternative, you could change the mouse pointer to something like the "redglass" pointer theme (which as a bonus also allows you to set the size of the pointer). You can do this from the Appearance dialog, click the Customize button, then the Pointer tab. You can try out other themes too.

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