Shake to Find Your Mouse Pointer on Mac (or Turn It Off)

Lose the pointer, wiggle the mouse, and it balloons to several times its size for a moment — long enough for your eye to lock on — then shrinks back. That's shake to locate, on by default in macOS. Here's how it decides what counts as a shake, where the toggle hides, and why gamers and designers often switch it off.

How it works

macOS watches for rapid back-and-forth pointer movement — quick direction reversals, not just speed. Wiggle the mouse left-right a few times, or scrub a finger side to side on the trackpad, and the pointer inflates instantly, tracks your movement at giant size, then shrinks once you stop. A fast-but-straight sweep across the screen won't trigger it; the reversals are the signature. The enlargement is purely visual — the click point never moves, and nothing under the pointer is disturbed.

It's most valuable exactly where pointers get lost: multi-monitor setups, 4K and 5K displays, and the moment after you stop typing and can't remember where you left the cursor. It works identically with a mouse, a Magic Trackpad, and the built-in trackpad. The feature has shipped on by default since OS X El Capitan in 2015, which is why most people have seen the balloon without ever knowing it was a setting.

Turn it off (or back on)

1. Open System Settings → Accessibility.
2. Select Display under the Vision section.
3. Flip Shake mouse pointer to locate.

Instant, no restart, same path on macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia. Flipping it back is the undo — nothing else in the pane changes either way.

The Terminal route

For setup scripts and fleet management, the same switch is a global preference:

# turn off shake-to-locate (log out and back in to apply)
defaults write -g CGDisableCursorLocationMagnification -bool true

# undo: return to the default (feature on)
defaults delete -g CGDisableCursorLocationMagnification

Note the key is a disable flag, so true turns the feature off. Unlike the Settings toggle, the command takes effect after you log out and back in.

Why anyone turns it off

• Games — fast flicking in games that use the system pointer inflates the cursor at the worst moments, right in the middle of the action. (Games that hide the cursor and capture the mouse aren't affected.)
• Precision work — rapid small strokes in drawing, photo retouching, or audio editing can read as shakes to the detector, and a suddenly giant cursor mid-stroke is jarring enough to cost you the stroke.
• Screen recordings and demos — an accidentally ballooning pointer looks sloppy in tutorials, and nervous presenters wiggle the mouse more than they realize.

If you turn it off but still lose the pointer, replace the emergency flare with permanent visibility: bump the Pointer size slider a notch or give the pointer a bright fill color — both live in the same Accessibility → Display pane, and neither ever triggers by accident.

If shaking does nothing

Expecting the balloon and not getting it? Three causes cover nearly every case. First, the toggle is off — check Accessibility → Display, and remember a migrated settings backup can carry an old "off" with it. Second, the CGDisableCursorLocationMagnification key above was set by a setup script or a tweak app years ago and forgotten; run defaults read -g CGDisableCursorLocationMagnification in Terminal, and if it returns 1, delete it with the undo command shown earlier, then log out and back in. Third, your shake is too polite — the detector wants several rapid direction reversals, so scrub hard, like scribbling. A slow wander back and forth never qualifies, by design.