f.lux my mouse cursor

January 16, 2012 5:15 AM

Using f.lux with an ATI video card and the latest AMD Catalyst drivers, how can I get the mouse cursor to change colors with the rest of the screen?

At night, my mouse cursor is bright white compared to the rest of the screen which gets really distracting. Are there any advanced settings in Catalyst or registry hacks to get the mouse cursor to behave like the rest of the screen?

My final option is to actually change the mouse cursor physically to amber... which I don't want to do.
 

posted by querty to computers & internet (3 answers total)

This is where your mouse cursor is being drawn in hardware by the video card. If you are using Windows, turning on mouse trails is the suggested solution - probably because this means the cursor is now being drawn in software instead.

This bugged me in Windows, but not so much on my Mac. Just looking at the cursor on the Mac, I realise that it is inverse to the Windows version (black pointer with white outline instead of white pointer with black outline) - if you don't want to use trails, a good second option might be to select a black pointer instead.
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 6:15 AM on January 16 [1 favorite]

Mouse trails worked! I'll have to get used to them though, thanks.

One would think that turning on mouse trails, the system would then draw them in hardware, but instead it's the other way around?
 
posted by querty at 7:21 AM on January 16

As I understand it, the graphics card has a part dedicated to drawing the cursor in hardware, so it isn't using portions of the card with bags of resource for fancy effects e.g. what post-XP Windows now uses to draw the desktop.

It is only for the display of the cursor, so as long as you only want a basic pointer on-screen it is on, otherwise it is switched off - hence it becoming software-drawn with trails enabled.
posted by NordyneDefenceDynamics at 11:13 AM on January 16