How can I enlarge a pixel-art mouse cursor without making it blurry?
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MellowCedar42
I downloaded a pixel-art mouse cursor on Ubuntu 26 and enlarged it because the original was too small. The resized cursor now looks blurry, and I'm wondering whether mouse-cursor anti-aliasing can be disabled or whether there's a better way to scale it while keeping the pixels sharp.
Answers
The cursor probably isn’t being anti-aliased directly—the blur is likely caused by scaling it by a non-integer amount. Pixel art should usually stay at its original size or be enlarged by an exact multiple, such as 2× or 3×. Scaling it to an in-between size forces interpolation and makes the edges blurry.
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When enlarging the cursor image, use nearest-neighbor scaling rather than a smooth interpolation method. That preserves the hard pixel edges, although the cursor settings themselves may not provide an option to choose the scaling method. You may need to resize the image file beforehand in an image editor.
MellowCedar42: I don’t see an option to choose the upscaling method in the cursor-size settings, so I’ll try preparing the image with nearest-neighbor scaling first.
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MellowCedar42: That makes sense. I’ll try resizing it by an exact multiple instead.