Jaime Ortega

manita

Makes the pointing hand your system-wide cursor.

Year
2026
Made for
macOS
State
shipped

Source

macOS has a perfectly good pointing hand cursor and reserves it for links. I wanted it everywhere.

It took eight failed approaches and a disassembly of the window server’s cursor handling to find the seam where this is possible without breaking anything else. The result is a tiny binary that does one absurd thing well. The repo has the postmortem for all eight attempts.

How to use it

Clone it and run the installer. The hand survives a logout.

  1. Terminal 
    git clone https://github.com/JaimeOrtegaxyz/manita.git
cd manita && ./install.sh

  2. To put the ordinary arrow back.

    Terminal 
    ./install.sh uninstall

Built and verified against macOS 26 Tahoe on Apple Silicon with SIP on. It works through private SkyLight APIs, so an OS update can stop it — it fails by leaving the normal arrow rather than by breaking anything. Your original cursors are backed up.

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