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Customize iPad Cursor and Mouse Buttons | iPad Mouse and Keyboard Tips and Tricks

7:20 video

iPadOS 13.4 brought mouse and trackpad support to the iPad. You can use just about any Bluetooth or USB mouse, but did you know you can customize the cursor and even the buttons on the mouse? Here’s how.

Basic mouse settings

Go to Settings > General > Trackpad & Mouse. With a mouse (a trackpad would have more options), you get:

  • Tracking speed for how fast the cursor moves.
  • Natural scrolling to reverse the scroll direction.
  • Secondary click, which effectively turns the mouse into a left-handed mouse.

Change the pointer

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Pointer Control:

  • Increase Contrast: changes the cursor from a lighter gray to a darker gray.
  • Automatically Hide Pointer: the cursor disappears after about 10 seconds.
  • Color: by default none; choose one of six colors and you get a ring around the cursor. Because the cursor snaps to certain objects in iPadOS, a color also gives those selected objects a colored border, which makes it easier to see what’s selected (I’m partial to orange lately). You can also change the size of the ring.
  • Pointer Size: adjusts the entire cursor, from comically large to wherever you’re comfortable.
  • Pointer Animations: turning it off disables the snap effect and the colored border around the items you hover over.
  • Scrolling Speed: changes how fast you scroll on a webpage or in a menu.

Customize the mouse buttons

This requires turning on AssistiveTouch (with one downside, below):

  1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > AssistiveTouch and enable it.
  2. Under Pointing Devices > Devices, you’ll see your connected mouse. Tap it, then tap Customize Additional Buttons.
  3. It asks you to click the button you want to customize, then gives you a list of functions.

My examples:

  • Scroll wheel button → Home. No matter what app I’m in, pressing down on the scroll wheel goes home, and a double press gets the recent app switcher, which makes jumping back to a previous app easy.
  • Another button → Screenshot: it takes a screenshot immediately that I can annotate, send or save to Photos.
  • A third → Volume Down: handy when something is too loud or I’m listening at night, instead of fumbling for the small volume button.

Some of the options are made for people with disabilities or motor function issues and may not be useful to you, but there are useful ones to assign.

The downside

Enabling AssistiveTouch leaves a faded gray orb floating on the screen (I think by default its opacity is 15%, so it’s pretty transparent and hard to see most of the time). There’s no way to hide it with AssistiveTouch on. It fades into the background after a while, and if it’s in an annoying spot you can drag it anywhere around the edges of the screen to reduce accidental touches, but it’s something to be aware of.

Did you customize your cursor and mouse buttons? Let me know in the comments.

Some links in this post are affiliate links, which means that if you click on one of the product links, I may receive a small commission. See my ethics statement.

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