How to highlight, enlarge or hide the cursor in a screen recording on Windows 11

5 min read

Short answer: to make the cursor bigger, go to Settings, Accessibility, Mouse pointer and touch and drag the Size slider. To highlight clicks, install the free Microsoft PowerToys and turn on Mouse Highlighter (Windows + Shift + H). To hide the cursor, untick the cursor option on your capture source in OBS. All three are free, and all three have the same catch: whatever the cursor looks like while you record is what's in the video for good.

Viewers follow the cursor more than anything else on screen, so a tiny white arrow on a 4K display is a lot of why screen recordings are hard to watch on a phone. Here's every free fix I know on Windows 11, and then the way I do it in my own recorder.

How to make the cursor bigger in a screen recording

Press Windows + U (or go to Start, Settings, Accessibility) and select Mouse pointer and touch. Under Mouse pointer, drag the Size slider until it's the size you want (Microsoft Support).

A recorder that includes the pointer records it the way Windows draws it, so a bigger pointer while you record means a bigger pointer in the video. Two tips:

  • Go bigger than feels right. It looks huge on your monitor and normal on a phone.
  • Put it back afterwards, unless you like it. It's a system setting, so it changes every app.

How to change the cursor colour

Same page: under Mouse pointer style you can pick white, black, inverted, or one of the bright colours, and Choose another color opens a full picker (Microsoft Support). A bright colour stands out on both light and dark apps, which a plain white arrow doesn't on a white web page.

How to highlight the cursor and clicks: PowerToys

PowerToys is Microsoft's free, open source set of Windows utilities. Install it from the Microsoft Store, GitHub, or with winget install --id Microsoft.PowerToys --source winget. Its Mouse utilities include three that help on camera (Microsoft Learn):

  • Mouse Highlighter shows a mark every time you click: green for a left click and blue for a right click by default. Turn it on and off with Windows + Shift + H. It has three modes, Spotlight, Circle highlight and Ripple, and you can set the size, colours and how quickly it fades.
  • Find My Mouse puts a spotlight on the cursor when you press Left Ctrl twice (or Right Ctrl, or shake the mouse, depending on the setting). Handy for "it's up here" moments.
  • Mouse Pointer Crosshairs draws crosshairs through the cursor, which is useful for pointing at one cell in a spreadsheet.

Do a five second test recording first. These are drawn on your real screen, so a recorder that captures the screen will normally pick them up, but it's worth seeing it before a 20 minute take.

Zoom and draw while you record: ZoomIt

ZoomIt is a small Microsoft tool for demos, and it's now part of PowerToys too. Ctrl + 1 zooms into the area around the cursor, Ctrl + 2 lets you draw on the screen, and Ctrl + 4 is a live zoom you can keep working in (Microsoft Learn, Microsoft Learn). Great for circling a button while you talk.

How to hide the cursor in a screen recording

  • OBS: open the properties of your capture source and untick the cursor option. On a Window Capture it's Capture Cursor; on a Display Capture OBS's guide calls it Show Cursor. Both are on by default (OBS Knowledge Base, OBS Knowledge Base).
  • Already recorded with the cursor in it? An editor can't lift a cursor out of the pixels cleanly. You can only cover it: crop it out, or put a blur or a shape over that corner for the frames where it shows.

So if there's any chance you won't want the cursor, record without it. You can't add it back later either.

The catch with all of these

Every free fix above changes what's on your screen while you record. That means:

  • You decide before you record. Too small, wrong colour, highlighter left on: it's in the video now.
  • A shaky hand stays shaky. The recording shows every jitter and overshoot your mouse made.
  • One look for every format. A cursor that's fine in a 16:9 YouTube video can be lost in a 9:16 crop for Shorts.

The fix for all three is recording the cursor as data (where it was, when you clicked, what shape it was) and drawing it in at export. That's how Framok does it.

The cursor drawn after: Framok

Framok, my screen recorder for Windows, hides the real Windows cursor while you record and keeps its position, clicks and shape. You still see a stand in cursor on screen while you work, drawn in a window the recording doesn't capture. Then the editor draws the cursor into the video, and you can change it as many times as you like.

  • 15 cursor styles, from Classic and a bold outline to a Mac arrow, pixel, neon, sketch, a dot and a crosshair. The arrow still turns into a hand or a text beam wherever the real one did.
  • Size from 40 to 250 percent, set after recording. Tall videos get a bigger cursor automatically.
  • Smoothing takes the jitter out of your hand. At 0 it draws exactly where the mouse went; turn it up and the cursor glides through the same points.
  • Clicks you can see: a ripple on every click, and the cursor presses down (wider and shorter for a moment) so a click reads even on a phone.
  • Hide it completely with the Show cursor switch, for a take where you'd rather people watch the screen.

Where Framok doesn't help

  • Only recordings made in Framok. It needs the cursor data it saves while recording, so it can't restyle the cursor in a video from OBS or the Snipping Tool.
  • No custom cursor images. You pick from the 15 built in styles.
  • Windows only. Windows 10 or 11, 64 bit. A Mac version has a waitlist at the bottom of framok.com.
  • No free trial on the download from framok.com. A 7 day trial comes with the Microsoft Store version, which isn't out yet, and paid licences have a 14 day money back guarantee.
  • The installer isn't code signed yet, so SmartScreen warns the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway.

Framok is $39 once for the life of the product, or $5 a month and cancel any time. Both cover 2 of your own PCs.

See Framok

Big cursor or small cursor in tutorials? I've gone back and forth on it way too many times.

Sources

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