I talked about this a bunch on mumble, so I figured it's high time someone made a post about them: HUD-crosshairs.
How it works, in my limited understanding, is that you use an integrated overlay to display text-characters on screen (such as a +).
This not only allows you to use virtually any character you can find in a font as a crosshair, it also allows you to layer multiple crosshairs and, most importantly imo, use outlines (big deal for me, always using a white crosshair).

The easiest way to "get in on this" would be to download a HUD with such a xhair already integrated. There are a plethora (google for full lists), I would recommend either PVHUD (comes with an updater/installer, very convenient. Doesn't look as nice as it could) or, what I switched to now, Broeselhud Blue (feels cleaner and more customizable imo- and comes with more crosshairs "out of the box"¹ than PVHud).

This is what I have mine set up like currently:

Small cross and thin circle crosshair both enabled on top of each other, obviously. Chose no outline for circle, looks horrible (even with AA) and distracts.
I might move the chatbox back to bottom left, will have to see how irritating it is at the top.

¹These are the default-crosshairs available in Broeselhud_Blue:


You can resize, recolour, reposition and reshape the crosshair however you want, and because of the outline they're always visible. I'm fairly sure it is possible to extract the crosshairs for use with the default HUD, but with some HUD-packs there might be dependencies on multiple other files and it could get finnicky. So, for ease of use and especially with future updates in mind I personally prefer to use a HUD-pack.

If you do get the "broesel blue hud", make sure to look at the readme.html before you do anything, most helpful EU. Lastly, broesel has also made a class-config-creator in case you want each class/weapon to use a different custom crosshair; it might be outdated now, but I'm sure it'd still be functional enough to get to work.

Happy...scripting?


tl;dr: click second link in thread, extract to /tf/custom/XXX, read readme.html, be happy.

P.S.: These are generally league-legal and don't get filtered by any whitelists.

If you're using any sort of custom HUD, today's update will make TF2 crash on startup- someone on /r/tf2 found a solution: Go to your /custom/* folder, then delete /resource/ui/wavecompletesummarypanel.res

Fixes the problem.

*Name of the HUD you're using