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Make insertion mouse cursor visible in dark Visual Studio editor


I use a color theme with a very dark background, which works great except that VS2010 uses the default insertion point mouse cursor when the mouse is over the editor pane, and that cursor is black — making it nearly impossible to see (literally impossible if the background is actually black as opposed to just very dark).

Is there a straightforward way to tell VS2010 to use a light version of the insertion point mouse cursor instead?

Things I've tried so far:

  1. I installed the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor (which enables theming of the rest of the UI, as opposed to just the editor) in hopes that it would do this automatically if I used one of its dark themes, but no such luck.

  2. I tried using different mouse pointers in Control Panel, but even though the cursor changed in some cases (for instance, if I picked one of the "very large" schemes), it was still black and so nearly invisible.


Solution

  • My temporary solution is that I'm using a custom "text select" cursor on the system as a whole, which I did by finding one that wasn't too outrageous, and then:

    Windows 7 and earlier:

    1. Open Control Panel

    2. Open the Mouse applet

    3. Choose the Pointers tab

    4. Select "Text Select" in the list

    5. Click the Browse button and choose the cursor file

    Windows 8:

    1. Click the Start button

    2. Type "mouse click" and wait

    3. Choose "Change mouse click settings" -- this gets you the old Mouse Properties dialog box

    4. Choose the Pointers tab

    5. Select "Text Select" in the list

    6. Click the Browse button and choose the cursor file

    Of course, this changes the cursor globally, not just in VS2010, and so I have to use one that works against both light and dark backgrounds (in my case, for now, the one from the DeepSky set on deviantart — only the text select one, not the full set).