Cursor Pro for the Mac

0:02
In this video, I’m going to show you one of my favorite Mac apps, cursor Perl. If you’ve watched any of my lessons, you’ll see that I have a blue circle that I highlight what I’m talking about. This is done through cursor Pro. Let’s take a look at cursor Pro on the Mac.

0:20
Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, when I go and highlight something, let’s go and highlight something on the dock, we’re gonna go to reminders here, the first thing you’ll notice is it has a blue circle there. And I can even zoom in on the Reminders app. This is all done through a third party app called cursor Pro. So if I want to show you the Apple menu, I go up to the Apple menu in the upper left hand corner, we can see the blue circle there, I press the Function key and I can zoom in.

0:51
And if I don’t do anything, what will happen is that blue halo there will disappear. Now I move my cursor, it comes back, I can also have that Halo show all the time. So if you have a hard time tracking your cursor, you may want to show that all the time. So that’s basically what cursor Pro is, let’s see where you find it. And then we’re going to take a quick look at the settings. It’s a pretty simple app. But people have asked me about it. So I thought I’d share how it works or how I use it. The first thing you’ll want to do is go to the App Store, this is where you can find it. So I’m going to go to the app store here.

1:30
And then what I do is I search for cursor Pro, there are a few apps out there that have similar features, I have found that cursor Pro works the best for me. So I search for cursor Pro, and you’re going to see we have cursor Pro, this is the one that I have been using. So now let’s take a look at some of the features that it has, and how it may help you.

1:53
When you open up cursor Pro, it’s installed in your Applications folder. When you open it up, what it does is it adds a new menu bar item. So I’m going to go to my menu bar here, you’re gonna see I have this cursor pro icon. When I click on this, what I’m able to do is enable it and disable it. I really love this because every once in a while, I will admit that I run into a problem with it. I’m trying to click on something and it won’t let me click on it. That’s because I have cursor pro enabled. It doesn’t happen that often. But if you can’t click on something, it may be because cursor perros enabled. So how do you disable it? Well, you don’t have to quit out of it, all you have to do is just go here, select it, and now it is disabled, you’re going to see that the icon here is a different color, I can’t zoom in, I move the cursor, it’s not showing the little halos and showing, I want to enable it again, all I do is just go up here, and I can enable it. So I really love that I can turn it on and off really easy. Let’s take a look at some of the settings. As I mentioned right now I have it set for I move my cursor, the halo shows. And if I hold down the function key, I can zoom in. But I can also have the halo show all the time. To do that, what we do is we go up to settings here, it opens up a new window, and it does disable it. So their cursor Pro is no longer enabled. When you open up the settings it does disable it. So I have here some tabs, I’m not going to be able to show you what those tabs are, I’m not going to be able to zoom in because cursor Pro is disabled. But basically up at the top here we have appearance, magnifier and behavior. With appearance, I can set what the appearance is, I have it set for a skwerkel which means it has rounded corners, but you can go and set it for any ellipse, rhombus or a rectangle, ellipse be in a circle. So let’s go ahead and make it a circle. I’m going to close this, we’re going to enable it. And now you can see that my cursor is or the Hallo is a circle. So we can set what that shape is. Let’s go back over my settings here, I can set the size. And then I can also set what the border weight is.

4:06
So if you want to make a little bit thinner or a little thicker, you can do that as well. And of course, you can set what the border style is. And if it glows, as well as the color.

4:17
When you click you can also have it animated. This is what is doing when it’s growing there. When you click it’s going to grow a little bit so you can easily see that you’re clicking. So those are the appearance settings. What other options do we have? Well, if we go over to magnifier here, this is where I can set what happens when I hold down the function key. As I mentioned, let’s go ahead and close this and I’m going to enable it. When I hold down the function key, it zooms in.

4:47
That’s the magnifier. So how far does it zoom in? Well, that’s all done in the settings here again, we go over to magnifier and what I can do is I can set the magnifier size as well.

5:00
is what the zoom factor is. So I could have zoom in further if I wanted to, and then what the quality is. And I use the function key as my magnifying key. But you can also change it to a different key, the function key works pretty well for me. But if you use the function key for something else, you can change it to a different key. The last option here is screen recording. When it zooms in, what it is doing is it’s taking a screenshot. So you need to do is you need to make sure that you give it access to screen recording, it’ll ask you to set this up. When you first open up cursor Pro, is here we have one monitor tab here behavior, under Behavior, what we can do is we can set what happens to that Halo, we can have it hide when it is inactive, this is what I have to do. So when I do not move my cursor, that Halo disappears, this is why it is disappearing. But let’s say you wanted to hide it when it is moving. When I select this, what it’s going to do is it’s going to hide it when it is moving. And then when it’s sitting still, it’ll show it so it’s going to be exactly opposite.

6:08
Let’s close this and see what I mean, we enable it again. And now I’m moving my cursor, so there’s no halo. But watch what happens when I stop moving it.

6:18
I have the halo. As soon as I move my cursor, it disappears. Now what you may want to do is have it set to always show the halo you can do that too. You go to your settings, we go over to behavior, and then we say hide, never. Now it’s never going to hide it. So if I go and close this, enable it,

6:42
that Halo is always going to show I can move it around makes it really easy to see the cursor to find the cursor.

6:52
Let’s go back over to my settings, we’re going to go back over to behavior, I’m going to bring it back over to when inactive. And then we have beg for attention.

7:02
What this will do is this will beg for attention, it will give you a little bit of attention when it is inactive. So if your cursor is inactive, what it’ll do is it’ll highlight a little bit.

7:14
I’m going to leave that off. And then you can also set a hotkey to enable and disable this part of the app this feature of the app. So you can easily just hit a key to enable and disable it. You can also set it to where this shows the app in the status bar as well as the dock and status bar, I like to have it just in the status bar or the menu bar as opposed to the dock and the menu bar, I have enough stuff in my dock, I do not need to have it also in my dock. So that’s why I just have it in the status bar, which is the menu bar. And then we can also set if we want it to auto start, which I recommend doing. So then it all starts and then if you want to turn it off, you can just go up to the menu bar and disable it and enable it. So that is cursor Pro. This is one of my favorite apps. It’s an app that I use on a daily basis, especially for my trainings. But I also do use it on my Mac, I have a couple of monitors, I have a lot of windows open. So what I may do sometimes is going to enable it. So then I can easily see where my cursor is, it makes it really easy to find that cursor. So that is one of my favorite apps, it’s called cursor Pro, and you’ll find it in the app store. I don’t think it’s too expensive and might be about 10 bucks, it’s well worth it for me. And if you have a hard time finding your cursor, you may want to give it a shot. I really haven’t had too many issues with it. The only issue I can think that I’ve had is every once in a while when I want to click on a button that might be a Mac dialog box or something like that doesn’t happen too often. But it does happen where I can’t click on it. And that’s just because cursor Pro is not allowing me to click on it. It’s almost like it’s putting a separate layer on top of it so I can’t click that button. So what I need to do is I just need to disable it, I go to the menu bar, I disable it, I can click on that button. And then I just enable it back up. And I can go and use my cursor pro again. That’s pretty much the only issue that I have but it’s very minor and it’s easy to work around. So that’s one of my favorite apps cursor Pro for the Mac.