The Disappearing Pointer
macOS is designed with aesthetic minimalism in mind. When you are watching a video in full-screen mode, or when you are typing a long document in a dedicated text editor, the operating system will automatically hide the mouse cursor after a few seconds of inactivity to remove visual distractions. While usually helpful, this becomes a severe friction point if you are a presenter giving a screen-shared tutorial where the audience needs to constantly track your mouse movements, or if you simply have vision impairments and struggle to locate a cursor that repeatedly vanishes and requires you to aggressively “shake” the mouse to make it reappear.
Keeping the Cursor Visible
Unfortunately, Apple does not provide a single, universal “never hide cursor” toggle in the standard System Settings, but you can stop macOS from automatically hiding the cursor by utilizing third-party utilities or terminal commands.
Because the hiding behavior is often hardcoded into specific apps (like Safari or QuickTime during video playback), the most reliable way to force the cursor to stay visible globally is to use a small utility app designed for presenters, such as Cursor Pro or Pro Mouse. These apps place a persistent halo or highlight around the pointer, which overrides the system’s idle-hide command. If you only want to stop the “shake to find” animation (which can be jarring), you can disable that natively. Click the Apple logo > System Settings > Accessibility > Display. Scroll down to the “Pointer” section and turn Off the toggle for Shake mouse pointer to locate. This will stop the cursor from expanding massively when you wiggle the mouse trying to wake it up.