The cursor disappears in Visual Studio 2015

Question

When using Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition, my cursor often disappears when I execute the Ctrl+. shortcut Ctrl+. to fix missing dependencies. For example, if I create a new Entity Framework object and want to add the [Required] attribute to one of my properties:

• Enter [Required] . The attribute receives a red underlined underline.
• Press Ctrl+. to open the proposed import.
• Select the option using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations using the arrow keys
• Press Enter to select it and import the using statement

Sometimes I can continue coding without any problems. But most of the time, my cursor disappears, and I have to go back to the code editor to return the cursor.

This happens to me on several different computers using Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10. I tried resetting the VS2015 to its default settings, but it didn't seem to help. The only thing I can think of is perhaps worth mentioning is that I'm using a dark theme.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a change in settings so that the editor retains focus or a key combination to return the cursor? It's not the end of the world to use a mouse, but I never had to do it in 2013, so it's a little annoying.

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem and found that if I go to the mouse properties and change the default pointer for Text Select to one with white in it, I did not lose the pointer in the editor. I don’t know if this will help solve your problem, but it helped me.

Answer 2

I also had this problem, for me it was a failure with the capabilities of the touch screen on my laptop. The cursor will disappear when using the track pad and move to the workspace in VS and return when I move it outside, for example, to the solution explorer or similar.

Easily resolved by touching the screen.

Answer 3

I had a problem with the missing cursor in VS 2015 Community Edition, and it turned out that the culprit was the Gotomeeting client software running on my desktop. I accessed VS 2015 in an RDP session, and while Gotomeeting started up on the desktop with an RDP client, my VS 2015 cursor in an RDP session would disappear by accident.

Answer 4

I had a problem that the blinking cursor completely disappeared in Visual Studio 2017 (and possibly elsewhere). Found this old post that helped me:

"I found the cause of the problem. I also noticed that I did not have a text cursor (carriage) in programs such as Windows Live Mail. Somehow, the size of my carriage changed to zero. The solution in Windows 7 was to go to Control Panel, The center of easy accessibility, make the computer more convenient for viewing, and in the section “Make things on the screen easier to see, to set the thickness of the blinking cursor to 1 (I had an empty field). After applying the change, the text cursor is displayed in the Visual Studio editor and in Windows Live Mail. "

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/vstudio/en-US/c7ba185e-1840-4649-984e-c12d5525baa2/cursor-not-visible-in-visual-studio-editor?forum=vseditor