How to make an animated Windows cursor

Plan the animation first

• Decide what the motion means. A spinning ring says “busy”; a gentle pulse says “ready”.
• Keep it short. Four to twelve frames is plenty. Pointers are small and the eye reads very little detail.
• Keep the shape stable. If the arrow tip moves between frames, the click point will feel unreliable.

Step by step in the creator

1. Open the cursor creator. It starts with a working animated example, so you can press Play in the preview and see how it behaves before changing anything.
2. Choose a size: 32×32 is the classic Windows size; 48×48 and 64×64 are sharper on high-DPI screens.
3. Draw frame one with the pencil, fill and eraser tools, or import a PNG, JPEG, WebP or other image your browser can open. Imported images are scaled to the chosen size and can be kept whole or cropped to fill. An imported GIF contributes only its first frame.
4. Add frames. Use Duplicate to copy the current frame and then change it a little, which keeps movement consistent. Turn on onion skin to see the previous frame while you draw.
5. Set each frame’s duration in milliseconds (20 to 5000). Windows measures time in 1/60 s steps, so AniFX rounds to the nearest step.
6. Place the hotspot with the Hotspot tool or by typing coordinates. The same hotspot is written to every frame.
7. Check the live preview, then press Download animated .ani.
8. Install it from the Windows Pointers tab (see the install guide).

Timing tips

• Around 60–100 ms per frame gives smooth, quick motion for spinners.
• Use longer holds (200–500 ms) on a key frame for pulses and blinks.
• Use the same duration for all frames first, then adjust individual ones.

Limits to know about

• A cursor can have up to 48 frames in the creator.
• All frames share one size and one hotspot.
• Animated GIFs are not imported frame by frame.
• The creator can test a static cursor in the browser, but .ani files can only be tried by installing them in Windows.

Honest status

AniFX writes cursor files to the documented Windows structures and checks them with independent parsers, but they have not yet been installed on a real Windows machine by the AniFX team. Try the 32×32 size first if anything looks wrong.