I used to have a frequent problem where I'd lose track of where the mouse cursor is, and it would take me a second or two to find it again. The problem was exacerbated at work, where I have a 20" iMac with an external 17" monitor, plus my MacBook. (I can seamlessly drag my mouse to the MacBook via the extremely useful teleport.) With all that screen real estate, if I made a big sweeping motion of the mouse to get it from the rightmost screen to the leftmost screen, it could take me a second or two to find where the cursor landed.

As you can see from my previous post, I have multiple screens at home as well. Ten days ago, when I added that 24" iMac in the middle, things went from slightly inconvenient to ridiculous.

In the past I've tried third-party apps like OmniDazzle and Mouseposé that create a highlight area around the cursor. I liked a couple of them, but for some reason I never stuck with one. I might revisit them, partly to help me find the mouse and partly because I might make videos of application demos someday, and the highlight is handy for that.

For now what I've done is increase the cursor size in System Preferences. I highly recommend this for anyone else whose eyes aren't as eagle-sharp as they used to be. Go to System Preferences -> Universal Access -> Mouse & Trackpad. Near the bottom is a slider for adjusting the size of the mouse cursor:

I did this for all my screens, even on my MacBook where I hadn't thought I had a problem tracking the mouse. I slid the slider to the first notch, which made the cursor the size of a healthy fly instead of a starving mosquito — much easier to track. I can locate it at a glance, with just a quick wiggle of the mouse, and it's big enough that I can track it with my peripheral vision when I sweep the mouse from one large screen to another three feet away.