black mouse cursor on cygwin terminal

problem description

When using a black background on a cygwin terminal in a windows VM on virtualbox, the mouse cursor is black. This makes it almost invisible. Useability is the problem.

versions VirtualBox: 4.1.22

cygwin: minty 1.2-beta1

Host O.S.: gentoo linux

Guest O.S.: windows 7

solution

WORKAROUND

tested in Win 2003, win 2008, win 7

In Windows, go to Control Panel > Mouse, "Pointers" tab.

If you change the Scheme to "Windows Black", your I-Beam text select cursor will turn into a black cursor with a whiteoutline (no matter the background). This works perfectly well against black background text.

If you don't want to change your entire pointer scheme, you can change just that one cursor: in the "Customize" area, scroll down to the Text Select cursor and hit "Browse". In the ensuing file selection dialog - which opens to the right folder automatically - choose the "beam_r.cur" file. That's the one used in the "Windows Black" scheme.

links

Ticket #750 - Text cursor always black with mouse integration (host ubuntu, guest winxp) Issue 274: When using black as background color the mouse cursor is almost invisible