Short version If you’re stuck with hand cursor in Photoshop or any other program, just uninstall Texter or any similar application you installed.

A few days ago when I opened my Corel Paint Shop Pro to edit some small image, I was shocked to see my cursor is stuck on hand, and nothing I tried could change it to normal. Everything was blocked and I couldn’t do anything. I said – well, whatever, I’m in a hurry, I’ll do it in Photoshop.

No luck. Photoshop’s cursor was stuck on hand too.

Ok, let’s google it. Turns out, it’s a common problem, and all solutions I found on blogs are the same – just press space when it happens and accept it as one of windows annoyances (or buy a mac).

Space? Cogs in the brain started working…

Oh, yeah, that morning I installed lifehacker’s Texter, and bound some text to… well, space!

After quick uninstall, hand never appeared again. So, if you have Texter, just uninstall it, or at least bind the actions to enter instead of space, and your cursor will be safe.

This probably goes the same for any application like Texter which waits in the background for you to press some key.