The weirdest thing is happening. My coworker noticed his blinking text cursor doesn't appear anymore, no matter where he selects/creates text. Even weirder? I'm editing his file now and I'm having the same problem. A bit of googling seems to show that I should trash my settings file but I'm afraid i'll lose all my custom settings.

Has anybody experienced this before? Thanks.

  • Even weirder– it looks like if I'm at less than 100% zoom, it'll show up. Gah! – Eric Chu Mar 20 '12 at 15:43
  • Is "Show Extras" unchecked in the View menu? – Farray Mar 20 '12 at 15:57
  • What if you turn off the OpenGL in the preferences? The GPU is used to draw some on-screen cursors at items if it's available. Turning off OpenGL may solve it issue. – Scott Mar 20 '12 at 16:17
  • out of curiosity, is he working on a medium gray background? I find my text cursor frequently vanishes over a middling gray across the entire Adobe suite, and sometimes I have to hide the gray to see where I'm typing. – Lauren-Clear-Monica-Ipsum Mar 20 '12 at 17:02
  • @Farray and Scott: Neither of those things have an effect. I was hoping they would :) Lauren: Nope. We're working on a pure white bg which would make the cursor stand out. In my first comment I mentioned if it's anything less than 100% zoom the cursor shows. – Eric Chu Mar 20 '12 at 20:02

I had this happen recently and I discovered that the image in question somehow had its resolution set to 1 pixel/inch (under Image > Image Size > Resolution field).

Once I changed the resolution to something higher, I could again see my text cursor.

What was happening was that I was selecting my text tool and clicking in the image to try and insert text and all I could see was a small dot where the text layer should have been. A new text layer was appearing in the layers menu but the text was not visible in the image itself (no visible cursor, no visible text).

  • Thanks a ton for this. This happened with me as my image's resolution was just 3 pixels/inch and I kept wondering why the text isn't appearing. – navjotjsingh Jul 11 '18 at 3:17


If this is the case, there likely isn't much that anyone can do for you. If it turns out that one of your custom settings is triggering some odd quirk in Photoshop's rendering engine, well, that setting has to go if you want your cursor back - and there's no way that people across the internet can trouble-shoot that problem for you.

Honestly, trashing the prefs isn't so bad. It's not unheard-of for people to uninstall/reinstall the entire Creative Suite when Photoshop misbehaves. If you can get out of the jam for the small price of default preferences, you're fortunate.

You may also want to peruse the answers on another Photoshop-bug-related question: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/2376/cant-see-the-canvas-its-transparent

At the end of the day, this sounds like a pure hardware or configuration bug - file a bug report if you feel so inclined.

  • I just lost my text cursor and underline in Photoshop (CS5) as well. And like you, at anything below 100% zoom, the cursor was showing. Based on Farray's response above, I simply toggled View/Extras from it's checked (on) state to off and then back on again, and the cursor returned in all zoom settings. – user13517 Jun 21 '13 at 17:21

in all Adobe Photo Shop Versions, its works 100%, because it is real rule. when selecting TEXT tool, then on menu baar there is all TEXT options shown, in that, there is a tab "T" ,with this a little triangle click at triangle arrow mark and drop down list will appear, in drop down list click on "Reset All tools". then problem solved.
