There can be many reasons why your cursor disappeared on your Chromebook. It can be because you accidentally disable the touchpad, it’s the more common reason as one shortcut exist that you could have triggered by accident.
But it can also be some configuration changes that occur because of an update or a wrong manipulation, your Chromebook could also have an issue regarding the hardware related to the mouse. I tried to find a solution to all of these issues and detail them below. As every Chromebook is different, the issues can be different too, but I did my best to tell you how to bring back the cursor on your Chromebook.
Toggles the touchpad to get the cursor back
As I said before, the most common reason why your mouse disappeared on your Chromebook is that you disabled it. I know it feels not possible as I doubt it too, but even if I’m used to computers as it’s my job, I accidentally disable the touchpad on my Chromebook.
To toggle back the touchpad on your Chromebook, you can use the same shortcut used to disable it, which is Shift+Search+P. You can try to press the keys multiple times to see if it helps as just disabling and enabling again the touchpad can also help to fix the issue.
You can also go to the control panel of your Chromebook to check the settings related to the mouse. As your mouse disappeared it’s quite tricky to go to the proper settings without the cursor but follow these steps and you will be able to look and change the mouse settings:
- On your Chromebook, press the search key or launcher key depending on your model.
- The search bar opens and you can search for Settings and press enter to go to the control panel
- Once the settings are opened, you can also search for the setting “Mouse” and press enter.
- Here are all the settings related to the mouse, you can press Tab to navigate forward and Shift + Tab to navigate backward. Then use enter to enable or disable a parameter.
- Check if any parameter should be enabled and try to do it using the keyboard.
Another way to fix the gone cursor issue is to restart your Chromebook. You might have already tried it but if did not yet, just go ahead and restart your Chromebook. Restarting is always helping as it will flush the memory and therefore reset some settings to their initial values.
If there is anything stuck on the software level, restarting will allow ChromeOS to refresh the software. It’s always the first thing to try on any of your devices, as soon as you have an issue, first try to restart it.