About Font Loft
Font Loft is a small, opinionated archive of Windows desktop cursor packs — the actual .cur and .ani files that draw underneath your arrow on every Windows machine since the 1990s. We catalog packs from open-license artists, organize them into ten themed collections, and link back to each artist's original source page so they get the credit and the traffic.
Why this site exists
Custom cursors used to be a defining piece of late-90s and early-2000s desktop culture. Schools, internet cafés, and the old RealDesktop forums would pass around cursor packs the way kids today pass around Discord emoji. Then Windows started shipping nicer defaults, browser-based cursor sites turned into ad-laden extension-walls, and the whole hobby quietly drifted off the public internet.
The art is still being made — open-source asset hubs like OpenGameArt.org, itch.io, and DeviantArt are full of brilliant pixel-art and vector cursor sets — but it's scattered across a dozen incompatible search experiences. Font Loft is an attempt to fix that for one specific use case: a Windows user who already knows what feeling they want their desktop to have ("I want my pointer to feel like a 16-bit JRPG menu") and just needs a reliable, well-credited list of options.
How packs are organized
Every pack is filed under exactly one of ten themes: gaming, anime, nature, neon, minimalist, retro, fantasy, horror, space, and holidays. We deliberately keep the taxonomy small so the homepage stays scannable. Within each theme the packs are sorted by lifetime download count — community favorites surface first — but every pack gets a full detail page with the original artist's name, license, and source link.
We do not host the cursor files themselves. The download button on every pack page links directly to the artist's own page on OpenGameArt, DeviantArt, itch.io, or wherever they originally published the pack. This keeps attribution intact, makes sure the artist gets the analytics, and ensures that if a pack is ever updated or pulled, you're always seeing the canonical version.
Where the data comes from
The catalog is built from a one-time PHP seed script that scrapes OpenGameArt.org's cursor section as its primary source — that site has the cleanest license metadata of any cursor archive on the public internet, and almost every entry is CC0, CC-BY, or CC-BY-SA. When the primary source is unreachable the seed script falls back to a hand-curated set of themed entries, so the site never ships in a broken state. The exact source used for the current build is documented in replit.md.
The seed script runs at build time only — the live PHP site reads the resulting JSON file at request time. There is no live scraping, no API calls during a page view, and nothing on this site requires JavaScript to function. Every page you see is rendered server-side from a flat data file and a handful of PHP templates.
About the previews
The cursor previews on every card and pack page are stylized SVG renderings in the artist's accent color, not the original art. We do this for two reasons: it keeps page weight tiny (every preview is under 1KB), and it sidesteps the awkward licensing problem of re-hosting thumbnails for hundreds of artists. To see the artist's actual pixel art, follow the source link on the pack page.
Who runs Font Loft
Font Loft is a hobby project. It exists because the maintainer wanted a less-annoying way to find cursor packs and figured a few hundred other people probably wanted the same. There's no company, no app, no signup, and the only revenue is the modest AdSense slot in the page header (which you can block guilt-free; the lights stay on either way).
Have a pack you'd like to see added — or are you an artist whose work is on the site and you'd like an attribution change? See the contact page.