9 ms·

macOS Cursors

172 points by disadvantage 4y ago

mdmglr 4y ago
Nice. Would be cool next step if this was compiled into a windows cursor pack.
- dxbednarczyk 4y ago
  Been using these on & off for over a year, no complaints https://github.com/antiden/macOS-cursors-for-Windows https://github.com/antiden/macOS-cursors-for-Windows
  - NegativeLatency 4y ago
    Nice, I usually just switch my cursor to the black one on windows and move on, but I'll have to give this a try
  - kitsunesoba 4y ago
    Been using a different macOS cursor pack on my Windows box for a while but it looks like this one might have better coverage. Thanks for the link. Might just be what I'm used to but for me a white bordered black cursor has always popped off the screen better than the inverse has. The default Windows cursor blends in and gets lost more easily.
bitwize 4y ago
These are Apple IP. It's most likely a violation of Apple copyrights and design patents to use them publicly or in a commercial context (aside from referencing them in CSS or displaying them using the proper macOS API calls).
- amelius 4y ago
  If that's true then showing a macbook next to a grande caffe latte with hazelnut syrup is also a violation of copyright (maybe even doubly so).
  - actionfromafar 4y ago
    and taste
  - deathanatos 4y ago
    (IANAL) … no, not "doubly so". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use, in particular, "Amount and substantiality" and "Effect upon work's value" ; I think such a use would be ruled fair use, if you, e.g., happened to have a Macbook incidentally in a photo of a coffeeshop. The MBP is not the sole focus of the shot, and any decent looking laptop could potentially stand in for it. You're not detracting from Apple's revenue selling laptops as a photo isn't a laptop. (Hell, if anything, in the right light, it's free advertisement if it advances Apple's product as a status symbol?) Vs. here's the cursors, here basically a direct copy. (As opposed to incidentally in another copyrighted work.) If you were to just download them an use them on your personal laptop, I doubt Apple is going to care, but if you download them & used them in a product … they might. The beachball is iconic (for better or worse).
- lapcat 4y ago
  Sosumi
- rizky05 4y ago
  [dead]
- m463 4y ago
  Hmmm I now wonder about fair use... "the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." is this "for comment"?
  - andix 4y ago
    The problems will start when you use those cursors on a website or in a commercial product. Just displaying them (like screenshots) should be fine.
- skissane 4y ago
  Some of them are rather generic, and look only imperceptibly different from those of other vendors (e.g. resize arrows) – IANAL, but for those, I think copyrightability (threshold of originality, purely functional vs creative elements, etc) is open to question. Whereas others (e.g. busy) are much more distinctive, and I think the odds of them being protected by copyright (and trademarks too) is much higher.
Dalewyn 4y ago
My only question is why MacOS initializes the cursor in the top left corner like a neanderthal from the 70s.
- golergka 4y ago
  Because most people are right-handed
- ithkuil 4y ago
  How do neanderthals from the 2020s hold the cursors?
- rad_gruchalski 4y ago
  No idea what you're talking about. MacOS Monterey initializes it in the center of the primary screen, after which I need to use the keyboard to put the password in. I restarted my macOS to give this very thoughtful and carefully written reply.
  - prime17569 4y ago
    This might be different based on model. On a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with macOS 12.6.3, the cursor initializes in the top-left at bootup. I think this started with Monterey, because on Big Sur and earlier, it always initialized in the center. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe NeXTSTEP also initialized the cursor close to the top-left corner. So this might either be an homage to NeXTSTEP (similar to how the Clarus dogcow has reappeared in macOS Ventura), or a bug. My bet is on the latter.
    - fredoralive 4y ago
      IIRC classic Mac OS also puts the cursor top left at startup. I have to admit "where the mouse cursor is at startup" is a very minor niggle for myself, as I rarely restart / shut down computers and the password field for the last user is usually selected and will take typing by default anyway (or after Ctrl-Alt-Del on Windows, if you're old school and turn that on). After sleep modes it could be anywhere, so you're going to be reorientating yourself anyway...
mahirsaid 4y ago
http://www.rw-designer.com/gallery?search=human&page=2 http://www.rw-designer.com/gallery?search=human&page=2 this one is for windows. they have custom ones which is cool
urbandw311er 4y ago
The beachball cursor, at least on mobile Safari, is incorrectly centred relative to the rotation animation and thus “wobbles”.
- emeraldd 4y ago
  Seeing the same thing in desktop Safari.
- 7e 4y ago
  Just like a real beachball! Classic Apple.
  - syspec 4y ago
    In this case it's the site doing that, not the actual beach ball cursor implementation on the operating system. The animation on the website is "wobbling"
- memalign 4y ago
  If anybody is curious, here’s the code for the beachball animation: https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_includes/partials/styles.njk https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_in... #beachball svg { animation: spin 0.5s infinite linear; transform-origin: 51.5% 51.5%; } @keyframes spin { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(360deg); } }
- danpalmer 4y ago
  This is really hard to get right with rotation transformations, so difficult in fact that most (correct) spinners just do not do rotation transformations and instead have manually pixel-aligned images for each frame of the animation.
  - mitemte 4y ago
    An elliptical CSS `clip-path` containing a slightly too large spinning beach ball might also suffice. It’d at least stop the edge wobble.
inconceivable 4y ago
has anyone figured out how to change the default cursor in macos? i.e. to another color. i remember looking around for this a while ago and found nothing. with 4k+ displays these days finding the cursor is sometimes frustrating. and the cursor radar thing is annoying to use
- thanatosmin 4y ago
  Shake the cursor and it will temporarily grow much larger. I think cursor customizations died with memory safety.
  - old_hat 4y ago
    System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Pointer There are options for pointer size, outline colour and fill colour. Go nuts.
    - frosted-flakes 4y ago
      I don't know if they've fixed this, but it used to be that the pointer target was inside the black border, not at the actual tip of the pointer. That's not really a problem if the pointer is at the default tiny size, but when you make it bigger suddenly everything you point at is offset by the thickness of the border, which makes it borderline unusable.
      - nanis 4y ago
        I don't think they have. It becomes particularly hilarious when you RDP to a Windows machine with the extra large cursor theme/
  - chucky_z 4y ago
    You can also do like me and just make your cursor gigantic. I keep it at about 75% of max size. My co-workers may make fun of me but using huge text and a giant cursor has actually caused my eyesight to improve in the last 2 years or so. n=1 so entirely anecdotally of course. :)
user3939382 4y ago
This got me wondering how I could set my macOS system cursors to something else. https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape/releases https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape/releases + https://www.deviantart.com/allannyholm/art/Mousecape-Throwback-2021-Mac-cursors-781872368 https://www.deviantart.com/allannyholm/art/Mousecape-Throwba... + The 2 .zip cursor packs on here https://www.macintoshrepository.org/33199-mighty-mouse https://www.macintoshrepository.org/33199-mighty-mouse Works on Ventura.
Forestessential 4y ago
you ppl should try importing cursors from linux.
ishvanl 4y ago
Here’s an interesting and perplexing point about MacOS cursors tangentially related to this article. Final Cut Pro, Apple’s flagship video editing software, overrides the default MacOS cursor with a nearly identical, but slightly different cursor shape. It’s almost exactly the same as the standard retina MacOS cursor but the little “stem” at the bottom is shorter & points slightly more to the right. I’d expect this from a weird niche bit of open source software, but for one of the Mac’s flagship applications it’s a bit strange. Perhaps someone here could enlighten me to the purpose of this bizarre quirk.
- exogen 4y ago
  I can't provide the reason, but I can add a story that might shed light on the answer. Years ago I was hosting a movie night and we were watching a dark, stylish black & white film that required subtitles. This was either in iTunes or TV.app, whichever was Apple's flagship movie watching app at the time. Every time a subtitle appeared on the screen, the gamma (or something affecting brightness) would change ever so slightly, affecting the whole scene in a barely perceptible way. It drove me nuts. This wasn't some kind of adaptive dimming from the screen; I confirmed that the actual image (even when watching just on the laptop screen) was changing. After some searching, a really wacky solution popped up: if you go into the Accessibility settings and bump up the size of the cursor ever so slightly, it'll fix it. Supposedly, the reason was that macOS's cursor drawing is heavily optimized (potentially in the firmware?) and thus uses a different drawing path (maybe with GPU acceleration vs. without?) depending on whether the default cursor is being used or not. So, whatever drawing routine was used to render subtitles causing the gamma to shift was also triggered by having a different default cursor, making it the same whether or not subtitles were on the screen. Even though I found a fix, to this today I'm still furious that Apple – supposedly known for their quality, attention to detail, and good multimedia experience – could overlook this in their flagship app. And now it's something I always do when setting up a new Mac: bump the cursor size.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jesse_faden 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aydoubleyou 4y ago
Very nice. Now add another set of cursors but for Classic Mac OS.
ChilledTonic 4y ago
If you want to investigate the history of the macOS cursor, and other cursor schemes, I highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg + http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/ http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/
dwardu 4y ago
Ive got to say, i do miss those wacky times when you can customise your cursors in windows.
Jerry2 4y ago
Whenever I install a fresh Linux distro, the very first thing I do is I install a macOS cursor and replace the default one. I just can't use a mouse without this cursor. Every other cursor just doesn't look right to me. I know, I know... I'm sure others tend to install whatever they're familiar with.
foxbee 4y ago
Great timing. I was looking for a grab cursor yesterday! Cheers
jFriedensreich 4y ago
i don’t get why they did not get rid of the tail, don't most people feel the shape is a bit archaic now?
- Krssst 4y ago
  I guess it removes the ambiguity as to where the cursor is pointing. Other non-ambiguous shapes are possible but you can't go wrong with an arrow. It is harder to see what a non-isoscele triangle would point to. Spaceship-type cursors seem fine but maybe not neutral enough in taste?
idank 4y ago
It's common to see tutorial videos use a different cursor that also reacts to clicks, eg. https://ghost.org/videos/themes.mp4 https://ghost.org/videos/themes.mp4 How is this done?

macOS Cursors

172 points by disadvantage 4y ago

mdmglr 4y ago

Nice. Would be cool next step if this was compiled into a windows cursor pack.

dxbednarczyk 4y ago
Been using these on & off for over a year, no complaints https://github.com/antiden/macOS-cursors-for-Windows https://github.com/antiden/macOS-cursors-for-Windows
- NegativeLatency 4y ago
  Nice, I usually just switch my cursor to the black one on windows and move on, but I'll have to give this a try
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  Been using a different macOS cursor pack on my Windows box for a while but it looks like this one might have better coverage. Thanks for the link. Might just be what I'm used to but for me a white bordered black cursor has always popped off the screen better than the inverse has. The default Windows cursor blends in and gets lost more easily.

bitwize 4y ago

These are Apple IP. It's most likely a violation of Apple copyrights and design patents to use them publicly or in a commercial context (aside from referencing them in CSS or displaying them using the proper macOS API calls).

amelius 4y ago
If that's true then showing a macbook next to a grande caffe latte with hazelnut syrup is also a violation of copyright (maybe even doubly so).
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  and taste
- deathanatos 4y ago
  (IANAL) … no, not "doubly so". See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use, in particular, "Amount and substantiality" and "Effect upon work's value" ; I think such a use would be ruled fair use, if you, e.g., happened to have a Macbook incidentally in a photo of a coffeeshop. The MBP is not the sole focus of the shot, and any decent looking laptop could potentially stand in for it. You're not detracting from Apple's revenue selling laptops as a photo isn't a laptop. (Hell, if anything, in the right light, it's free advertisement if it advances Apple's product as a status symbol?) Vs. here's the cursors, here basically a direct copy. (As opposed to incidentally in another copyrighted work.) If you were to just download them an use them on your personal laptop, I doubt Apple is going to care, but if you download them & used them in a product … they might. The beachball is iconic (for better or worse).
lapcat 4y ago
Sosumi
rizky05 4y ago
[dead]
m463 4y ago
Hmmm I now wonder about fair use... "the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." is this "for comment"?
- andix 4y ago
  The problems will start when you use those cursors on a website or in a commercial product. Just displaying them (like screenshots) should be fine.
skissane 4y ago
Some of them are rather generic, and look only imperceptibly different from those of other vendors (e.g. resize arrows) – IANAL, but for those, I think copyrightability (threshold of originality, purely functional vs creative elements, etc) is open to question. Whereas others (e.g. busy) are much more distinctive, and I think the odds of them being protected by copyright (and trademarks too) is much higher.

Dalewyn 4y ago

My only question is why MacOS initializes the cursor in the top left corner like a neanderthal from the 70s.

golergka 4y ago
Because most people are right-handed
ithkuil 4y ago
How do neanderthals from the 2020s hold the cursors?
rad_gruchalski 4y ago
No idea what you're talking about. MacOS Monterey initializes it in the center of the primary screen, after which I need to use the keyboard to put the password in. I restarted my macOS to give this very thoughtful and carefully written reply.
- prime17569 4y ago
  This might be different based on model. On a MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) with macOS 12.6.3, the cursor initializes in the top-left at bootup. I think this started with Monterey, because on Big Sur and earlier, it always initialized in the center. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe NeXTSTEP also initialized the cursor close to the top-left corner. So this might either be an homage to NeXTSTEP (similar to how the Clarus dogcow has reappeared in macOS Ventura), or a bug. My bet is on the latter.
  - fredoralive 4y ago
    IIRC classic Mac OS also puts the cursor top left at startup. I have to admit "where the mouse cursor is at startup" is a very minor niggle for myself, as I rarely restart / shut down computers and the password field for the last user is usually selected and will take typing by default anyway (or after Ctrl-Alt-Del on Windows, if you're old school and turn that on). After sleep modes it could be anywhere, so you're going to be reorientating yourself anyway...

mahirsaid 4y ago

http://www.rw-designer.com/gallery?search=human&page=2 http://www.rw-designer.com/gallery?search=human&page=2 this one is for windows. they have custom ones which is cool

urbandw311er 4y ago

The beachball cursor, at least on mobile Safari, is incorrectly centred relative to the rotation animation and thus “wobbles”.

emeraldd 4y ago
Seeing the same thing in desktop Safari.
7e 4y ago
Just like a real beachball! Classic Apple.
- syspec 4y ago
  In this case it's the site doing that, not the actual beach ball cursor implementation on the operating system. The animation on the website is "wobbling"
memalign 4y ago
If anybody is curious, here’s the code for the beachball animation: https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_includes/partials/styles.njk https://github.com/daviddarnes/mac-cursors/blob/main/src/_in... #beachball svg { animation: spin 0.5s infinite linear; transform-origin: 51.5% 51.5%; } @keyframes spin { from { transform: rotate(0deg); } to { transform: rotate(360deg); } }
danpalmer 4y ago
This is really hard to get right with rotation transformations, so difficult in fact that most (correct) spinners just do not do rotation transformations and instead have manually pixel-aligned images for each frame of the animation.
- mitemte 4y ago
  An elliptical CSS `clip-path` containing a slightly too large spinning beach ball might also suffice. It’d at least stop the edge wobble.

inconceivable 4y ago

has anyone figured out how to change the default cursor in macos? i.e. to another color. i remember looking around for this a while ago and found nothing. with 4k+ displays these days finding the cursor is sometimes frustrating. and the cursor radar thing is annoying to use

thanatosmin 4y ago
Shake the cursor and it will temporarily grow much larger. I think cursor customizations died with memory safety.
- old_hat 4y ago
  System Settings -> Accessibility -> Display -> Pointer There are options for pointer size, outline colour and fill colour. Go nuts.
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    I don't know if they've fixed this, but it used to be that the pointer target was inside the black border, not at the actual tip of the pointer. That's not really a problem if the pointer is at the default tiny size, but when you make it bigger suddenly everything you point at is offset by the thickness of the border, which makes it borderline unusable.
    - nanis 4y ago
      I don't think they have. It becomes particularly hilarious when you RDP to a Windows machine with the extra large cursor theme/
- chucky_z 4y ago
  You can also do like me and just make your cursor gigantic. I keep it at about 75% of max size. My co-workers may make fun of me but using huge text and a giant cursor has actually caused my eyesight to improve in the last 2 years or so. n=1 so entirely anecdotally of course. :)

user3939382 4y ago

This got me wondering how I could set my macOS system cursors to something else. https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape/releases https://github.com/alexzielenski/Mousecape/releases + https://www.deviantart.com/allannyholm/art/Mousecape-Throwback-2021-Mac-cursors-781872368 https://www.deviantart.com/allannyholm/art/Mousecape-Throwba... + The 2 .zip cursor packs on here https://www.macintoshrepository.org/33199-mighty-mouse https://www.macintoshrepository.org/33199-mighty-mouse Works on Ventura.

Forestessential 4y ago

you ppl should try importing cursors from linux.

ishvanl 4y ago

Here’s an interesting and perplexing point about MacOS cursors tangentially related to this article. Final Cut Pro, Apple’s flagship video editing software, overrides the default MacOS cursor with a nearly identical, but slightly different cursor shape. It’s almost exactly the same as the standard retina MacOS cursor but the little “stem” at the bottom is shorter & points slightly more to the right. I’d expect this from a weird niche bit of open source software, but for one of the Mac’s flagship applications it’s a bit strange. Perhaps someone here could enlighten me to the purpose of this bizarre quirk.

exogen 4y ago
I can't provide the reason, but I can add a story that might shed light on the answer. Years ago I was hosting a movie night and we were watching a dark, stylish black & white film that required subtitles. This was either in iTunes or TV.app, whichever was Apple's flagship movie watching app at the time. Every time a subtitle appeared on the screen, the gamma (or something affecting brightness) would change ever so slightly, affecting the whole scene in a barely perceptible way. It drove me nuts. This wasn't some kind of adaptive dimming from the screen; I confirmed that the actual image (even when watching just on the laptop screen) was changing. After some searching, a really wacky solution popped up: if you go into the Accessibility settings and bump up the size of the cursor ever so slightly, it'll fix it. Supposedly, the reason was that macOS's cursor drawing is heavily optimized (potentially in the firmware?) and thus uses a different drawing path (maybe with GPU acceleration vs. without?) depending on whether the default cursor is being used or not. So, whatever drawing routine was used to render subtitles causing the gamma to shift was also triggered by having a different default cursor, making it the same whether or not subtitles were on the screen. Even though I found a fix, to this today I'm still furious that Apple – supposedly known for their quality, attention to detail, and good multimedia experience – could overlook this in their flagship app. And now it's something I always do when setting up a new Mac: bump the cursor size.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jesse_faden 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

aydoubleyou 4y ago

Very nice. Now add another set of cursors but for Classic Mac OS.

ChilledTonic 4y ago

If you want to investigate the history of the macOS cursor, and other cursor schemes, I highly recommend this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YThelfB2fvg + http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/ http://www.michieldb.nl/other/cursors/

dwardu 4y ago

Ive got to say, i do miss those wacky times when you can customise your cursors in windows.

Jerry2 4y ago

Whenever I install a fresh Linux distro, the very first thing I do is I install a macOS cursor and replace the default one. I just can't use a mouse without this cursor. Every other cursor just doesn't look right to me. I know, I know... I'm sure others tend to install whatever they're familiar with.

foxbee 4y ago

Great timing. I was looking for a grab cursor yesterday! Cheers

jFriedensreich 4y ago

i don’t get why they did not get rid of the tail, don't most people feel the shape is a bit archaic now?

Krssst 4y ago
I guess it removes the ambiguity as to where the cursor is pointing. Other non-ambiguous shapes are possible but you can't go wrong with an arrow. It is harder to see what a non-isoscele triangle would point to. Spaceship-type cursors seem fine but maybe not neutral enough in taste?

idank 4y ago

It's common to see tutorial videos use a different cursor that also reacts to clicks, eg. https://ghost.org/videos/themes.mp4 https://ghost.org/videos/themes.mp4 How is this done?