These Googly Eyes Will Help You Find Your Mac's Cursor

It happened again: Across sprawling tabs, dozens of windows, and countless unread messages, you've somehow lost your cursor. Maybe it's hiding in the corner of your screen, but, hmm—nothing seems to be popping out of any of them. What's more, if you have your Mac connected to multiple monitors on your desk, your cursor could be anywhere. Tell work to push your deadlines; you're gonna need a minute.

But before you damage your reputation, there's a better way. Well, a couple of ways, actually—but one of them is far more fun. To save yourself from this grief in the future, try "Googly Eyes," a free app that adds, yes, a pair of googly eyes to your Mac's menu bar.

Googly Eyes is the creation of Sindre Sorhus, a developer we've frequently covered on Lifehacker. Sorhus has made sticky notes for the menu bar, tools to adjust the spacing of the menu bar, an easy way to switch your default browser on the fly, an app for expanding the number of extensions Shortcuts supports, and a tool for making Finder more like Windows' File Explorer.

Googly Eyes is a little different, because the premise is beyond simple: Once you install and launch the app, you'll find a pair of cartoonish googly eyes resting on your Mac's menu bar. These eyes are trained on the location of your cursor: Move your mouse or glide your finder on your trackpad, and the eyes will follow it.

My cursor disappeared while typing the above paragraph. Rather than scrambling around looking for it, I can glance up at the googly eyes, see they're focused on the right side of my Mac, then move my mouse to the left, where my cursor will predictably reappear. Click your mouse or trackpad, and the eyes blink. It's fun and useful.

That's all there really is to it. If you're bored on your Mac, you can bring your cursor up to the googly eyes to mess with them a bit. Moving directly between the eyes will cause them to go cross-eyed, while dragging more towards one eye will cause that eye to move away from the other a bit.

Credit: Lifehacker

Now, there is a solution built into macOS for whenever you can't find your cursor: shake it. Shaking your cursor really fast not only increases the chances you'll see it buzzing around your screen, your Mac will also temporarily make it huge. It's a great feature, but it isn't perfect: Sometimes, shaking your cursor doesn't pull it up, especially if you're working across monitors, or the task requires more vigorous shaking than you might expect. In these cases, you might want a pair of helpful eyes to keep watch for you, and clue you into your cursor's position.

Googly Eyes is a simple setup, but Sorhus does have some troubleshooting advice should you need it: If you don't see Googly Eyes in your menu bar after opening the app, quit some other menu bar apps, as macOS sometimes hides these apps when there are too many open at once (especially on smaller displays). If your Mac cannot access the App Store, you can download the app directly from Sorhus, but note this method won't offer automatic updates, and Sorhus will only update the app on his website on an annual basis.

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