Mouseflare: never lose your mouse cursor again

I lose my mouse cursor. Multiple monitors, high-DPI displays, switching between a dozen windows a minute — the cursor is one pixel-wide thing to track, and half the time by the moment I need it I’m not even looking at the right screen. Mouseflare exists because “where’s my mouse?” was a question I asked myself several times a day, and shaking the mouse around until I spot it isn’t a real answer.

Mouseflare does two things. While you work, it trails the cursor with a subtle particle effect — a spark trail, a glow pulse, whatever you pick — so your eye can follow it without thinking about it. And when you actually need to find it fast, one global hotkey fires a bright flare at its exact position from any app: press it, the flare erupts, cursor found. That’s the whole feature list, on purpose. I wanted “impossible to lose” to be true, not “has forty settings you’ll never touch.”

Everything renders on a transparent, click-through overlay, so it never intercepts a click or steals focus, and it sits near-idle when you’re not actively using it. Mixed resolutions and mixed DPI scaling across monitors are handled by design — that combination is exactly what broke every other trick I tried before building this.

It’s free and open source: no account, no telemetry, no network calls, nothing phoning home. Native apps ship for macOS and Windows. If you want to try the effects before installing anything, there’s a browser demo with the same FX Designer the native apps use — tune density, speed, color, trail length, sound, and reduced-motion, or just grab a preset that looks right.

One honest caveat: the macOS build isn’t Apple-notarized yet, so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch. The release page has the one-line fix. That goes away once notarization clears — for now it’s a speed bump, not a wall.

Download it for macOS or Windows, try the live demo first, or go read the source — it’s all open.