Custom Cursor Colors in Windows

Windows 10 now includes the option of using vector-drawn cursors of any color and size you choose. Here’s how to set it up.

Custom cursors haven’t been as popular as they were in the late 90s. In the geocities era of the late 90s, software like the Plus! Packs for Windows had a ton of cursors, including animated gems like these:

My personal favorite was using the animated gears in lieu of the traditional hourglass busy cursor.

While these .cur and .ani files still work today (you can even download these ones from my Plus Pack Themes blog post), they have lost some fidelity over the last 20 years. When scaled up to accommodate a high-resolution monitor these small cursors become blocky and pixelated.

If a more modest customization is your style, you’re in luck. Windows 10 now includes the ability to set a custom cursor color and size without any visual distortion by using a vector-drawn cursor.

This feature was added to Windows for the purposes of accessibility, as a contrasting color can greatly assist those with low vision. But there is no reason we can’t use the same feature to customize the cursor for aesthetics as well.

In my case, I want to match my cursor color to match the shade of my blueprint paper wallpaper (which you can also get from my Blueprint Wallpaper blog post). I’ll start by opening the blueprint picture in Paint and getting the color’s value with the color picker tool.

The color picker lets you get the precise color value for any point on a picture. After picking the color, click “Edit Colors” to see the Red/Green/Blue values.

Now setting the color is as easy as opening Settings and heading over to the Ease of Access / Mouse Pointer settings and choosing a custom color.

For a perfect match when setting a custom color, click the “More” text to expand the dialog and type in the precise RGB colors that were discovered using Paint’s color picker.

I also took a moment to set matching colors for my text cursor (here in the Ease of Access options as well), and the Personalization settings for my system accent color. The end result is a minimal blueprint motif to be proud of: