In October last year, Microsoft released a major update for its PowerToys suite. The update included a new Find My Mouse tool, which helped users easily locate the mouse cursor on their screens by shining a spotlight on it. Microsoft then released a Mouse Highlighter tool with PowerToys 0.51, which highlighted the cursor with a yellow circle on mouse button clicks, making it easy for users to show clicks during a presentation. Microsoft is now rolling out another mouse utility with PowerToys 0.55.0 that aims to help users locate the cursor on their screens by taking a slightly different approach.

The new Mouse Pointer Crosshairs utility in PowerToys 0.55.0 draws a crosshair on your screen centered on the mouse pointer (via Bleeping Computer). You can enable it using the default Ctrl+Alt+P keyboard shortcut (or set up a custom shortcut) and customize its appearance by heading to the Appearance & behavior section under the new 'Mouse Pointer Crosshairs' setting. As you can see in the attached screenshot, you can change the crosshair color, opacity, center radius, thickness, border color, and border size.

Mouse Crosshair Utility settings PowerToys

Unlike the Find My Mouse utility, in which the spotlight disappears after a few seconds, the new mouse pointer crosshair is persistent. This means that it'll stay on your screen until you disable it using the keyboard shortcuts. As a result, it should be a bit more useful for users who have some form of visual impairment. The PowerToys team says that the new crosshair utility was co-developed with the accessibility team at Microsoft.

Along with the new Mouse Pointer Crosshairs tool, PowerToys 0.55.0 brings preview support for more than 150 developer files for the preview pane and STL format thumbnail generation with two new File Explorer add-ons. The update also includes a number of bug fixes, improvements, and changes. Check out the full changelog in the section below for more details.

You can download PowerToys 0.55.0 on the Microsoft Store or from the PowerToys GitHub page.