mouse shake not working

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w.pasman Author

Level 1

44 points

mouse shake not working

I have the mouse 'shake to locate' enabled in the Accessibility options.

But it does not work properly.

Reproduce:

4K screen @ 60Hz
mouse tracking speed set to 1 tick below 'fast', so almost entirely to the max
cursor size 'normal', display contrast 'normal'.
Run fast tight horizontal ellipses, at least 4 per second, spanning half of the screen. If this is not "vigorous" I don't know what is. If you do this you can see the mouse pointer making jumps of maybe 500 pixels (rough guess). It appears just as a cloud of arrows scattered over the screen.
Most times, the arrow does usually not enlarge as it should. Sometimes it does briefly only to return to the standard tiny arrow.

This is very annoying as locating the small pointer on a 4K screen is very hard under less-then-max contrast situations.

Problems with this have been reported for years, but apparently it's not being solved. Am I missing something?

Posted on Mar 22, 2020 7:08 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 22, 2020 8:26 AM in response to w.pasman

Only side-to-side movement is intended to produce the momentary increase in size of the mouse-pointer for mouse-location.

Try also specifying that the mouse-pointer should be one-click larger than normal.

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Answer 2

w.pasman Author

Level 1

44 points

Mar 22, 2020 9:58 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for the suggestion. Where is it specified that only side to side motion MUST be made? The pref only says "quickly move the mouse pointer back and forth". If I would read this strictly, I would interpret this as up-and-down

A minute ago the shake worked, and the direction of the shake was irrelevant, I tried diagonal, up/down and left-right, all worked.

Right now it's broke again, no matter the direction

After it breaks, you can shake anywhere as hard as I can but the pointer remains small. if you click in some window or right-clicking in the finder it seems to start working again. I'm still not sure what breaks it.

So sometimes it is broken, sometimes it works just fine.

>Try also specifying that the mouse-pointer should be one-click larger than normal.

I vaguely remember once where you can set that size but I don't see it anymore. I have the shake size substantially bigger than normal because otherwise I still can't find it

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Answer 3

w.pasman Author

Level 1

44 points

Mar 22, 2020 7:09 AM in response to w.pasman

Forgot to mention, this is with an external mouse, in this case a razor taipan. There are no special drivers needed to use the mouse.

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mouse shake not working

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