Two-headed arrow

[Krakus2000]

I just bought your software. Works great in my game, Company of Heroes 2, which was my main reason for buying this. But, I also wanted to use your cursors in Windows 10. One problem though, I cannot easily resize my windows using your cursors. They seem to lack one thing, the two-headed arrow feature when I am close with my cursor to the edge of the window to be resized. Why the cursor doesn't change to that? it is really hard to use your cursor only for that. You have to be very precise with a cursor position, and it is hard to get in high-resolution screens.

[Admin]

Sorry to hear of this problem. CursorNode allows easy switching off of the cursor customisation. If you press the hotkey combo, the customisation is toggled on or off. When the customisation is off, you will have all your normal cursors back, including the resize cursors. Once you are done with the resize cursor, you can use the hotkey again to bring your customisation back. This approach might be a small inconvenience, but not too much. I do run into this problem myself on occasions. We will look into not changing the resize cursor. Currently, there is no ETA for that. Hope this helps.

[Admin]

For your purpose, I can recommend using a Cursor Set. The Cursor Set allows you to only change the cursors that you want to change while leaving the rest untouched. The Cursor Set is selected from the cursor menu on the Cursor-tab. The ID numbers for the cursors you want to customise are obtained using the Tags-tab.

[Krakus2000]

Thanks for your reply. I would like to use the Cursor Set, but I am not sure how to do that. I am in the Cursor tab, but not sure what to do next. there is no options description showing when I position the cursor over them. Pictures are fine, but... I am new to this business and have to find my way around it. Can you post more detailed step-by-step directions? Maybe some menu pics would help me. Thanks.

One more thing. The window for selecting options in your app looks awfully small in 5K resolution. I know I can make it larger, and I did, but even so, the text is just too small to read without special effort.

[Krakus2000]

I just noticed one curious thing. When I use Microsoft Outlook, the cursor behaves differently. When I position it over the edges of the window, or over the corners of the Outlook window, it changes to the two-headed arrow. That's exactly what I want. But, it happens only when I use Outlook. Peculiar. Any ideas why is that?

[Admin]

Changing cursors in Windows is a very complex business. The Outlook behaviour is one of these complexities. Some other apps may also behave in the same way if you run into them. There is no whys to it. It just is. Different app developers choose different ways to manipulate the cursors. CursorNode is built to manage the infinite varieties as best as it could.

We can deal with your cursor issues in baby steps while you are still learning to use CursorNode. First of all, you need to set up the Hotkey combo. The hotkey controls the appearance of cursor customisation.

In the Keys-tab, you can tick the keys you want to use as the hotkey. For instance, if you tick the left "Shift" and the right "Shift" boxes, then when you press the left and right shift keys on your keyboard at the same time, your cursor customisation is disabled and all your original cursor are back in use. If you press the the combo again, your customisation reappears. Press the combo again, the customisation disappears, and so on.

Once you are able to control the appearance of customisation, then it is perfectly safe for you to click anything in CursorNode to see what it does. Some of the icons and buttons will show information only after you click them. So, click them and see. If you click anything that does something unexpected (there shouldn't be anything like that), you can use the hotkey to disable customisation and have full control again.

[Admin]

In order to use a Cursor Set, you will need to supply cursor images. You can draw up the images yourself, find them on the internet, or copy some from "C:\Program Files (x86)\Cursor Node\dat\". Place these images in a location of your choice. Next, follow this video to register the cursor images with CursorNode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NrwjfuZGmc

The images you have gathered in this step will be turned into cursors that you can use for replacing game or windows cursors in a Cursor Set. CursorNode will list these images using their original file names. So, name the images in a way you find easy to recognise. However, don't change their file extensions ".png", ".gif", etc.

[Admin]

Next, you need to identify the cursors you are unsatisfied with. Once these are identified, you can then replace them with your own cursor designs. Your own designs are registered by the previous step.

The Tags-tab is what you use to identify the cursor ID's. The ID can be numeric, or text. These ID's are used in Cursor Sets. To begin identification, hold down the Hotkey combo and press the [return] key. Your cursor will now show "01", "02", ... "ARW", etc. These are tags for the cursor being identified. To switch between the tag and the cursor being identified, you can press the Hotkey combo. Tagging basically allows you to see what tag has been assigned to which cursor. For instance, the "ARW" is normally the tag for the Windows arrow (not true in some scenarios). Once you have the tag, you can look in the Tags-tab to see what cursor ID the tagged cursor has. The ID is what you need in a Cursor Set to specifically indicate a cursor you want to replace. In the Tags-tab, next to the ID field, is an editable field you can type in a name to help you remember which cursor has that ID. Click the "Name of pointer" field to enter or change the text.

While tagging, as you move the cursor on the screen, the tag will change to reflect the cursor at that location. Game cursors will have numerical ID's. Windows cursors will have text ID's: "ARW", "TXT", etc. For the windows cursors, only "ARW" will be shown in the Tags-tab. The rest are not added to the tab because their ID's are identical to the tags. The windows arrow will have a tag of "ARW" and a cursor ID of "ARW". The other windows cursors follow the same convention. A game cursor might have a tag of "01" and an ID of "123454321" for example.

[Admin]

Once you have the ID of the cursor you are unsatisfied with, and a cursor image registered with CursorNode, you are ready to set up a Cursor Set. From the Cursor-tab, open the cursor menu. Close to the bottom of the menu, select "Cursor set". The greenish boxes now showing will indicate the area you can make edits. Enter the ID (it should be a big number like 123454321) of the unsatisfactory cursor in the ID field. On the menu to the right of the field, select the image you want to replace the unsatisfactory cursor with. Click the button with an image of "+" in it. Now, the Cursor Set is ready to go. The unsatisfactory cursor will now be replaced by the image of your choice. No other cursors are affected.

You can follow the same steps if you want to replace multiple unsatisfactory cursors.

The ID for the windows arrow is "ARW", i-beam is "TXT", hand is "HND", etc. Game cursor ID's are usually big numbers, such as 123454321.

[Admin]

One more thing. The window for selecting options in your app looks awfully small in 5K resolution. I know I can make it larger, and I did, but even so, the text is just too small to read without special effort.

If you take a screen dump of the problem and send it to our support address, I will take a look. As it stands, we have designed the settings panel to work with resolutions of up to 4k. If you are using a higher resolution than that, then it might be a problem. I need to see the Settings Panel in relation to the rest of the screen. So, take a full-screen screen dump with CursorNode open. You can edit the dump to remove or black-out anything you want to keep private. The dump will only be used for my analysis and will not be shown to anyone else.

A lot of the text in CursorNode are copy-able. As a temporary measure, you can copy the text and paste it into windows notepad to read.