Why use a mouse highlighter
A mouse highlighter draws a shape around the pointer that moves with it. On your own monitor the arrow is easy to track. Shrunk into a video call thumbnail, thrown onto a projector across a classroom, or compressed in a tutorial video, it vanishes, and your audience spends the demo hunting for it instead of listening.
Mouse Position Highlighter keeps a colored mark on the pointer across every connected display. It is drawn as a layer that clicks pass through, so the program you are presenting keeps working normally and never loses focus to it.
Before anyone sees it, you can try each look on the small stage inside the app window: point there and the highlight behaves exactly as it will on the desktop. Clicking the lamp on the stage turns it on or off.
Four ways to highlight the mouse pointer
Each style answers a different problem, so pick by what you are showing rather than by taste.
- Halo: a soft disc of color behind the pointer. The general choice for calls and tutorials.
- Ring: only an outline, so text or a cell under the pointer stays fully readable.
- Spotlight: everything except a lit circle around the pointer goes dark. Use it when you want a room to look at one spot. Other monitors go fully dark while the pointer is elsewhere.
- Crosshair: thin lines run edge to edge through the pointer, handy for lining up rows and columns or pointing into a wide spreadsheet. Its size control sets line thickness.
Tuning the highlight for screen recording and projectors
Size runs from 30 to 300 pixels in steps of five. A projector at the back of a hall wants something large; a narrated screen recording looks cleaner at the small end. Color offers seven presets, from the default yellow to orange, red, pink, blue, green and white, plus any custom color.
Strength, from 10 to 100%, sets how solid the mark is. Lower values tint what is underneath instead of hiding it. With Spotlight there is no color; instead, How dark the rest goes sets the surrounding shade between 20 and 90%.
Show the highlight only when you need it
A highlight that is always on can get in the way between demos. Under Show the highlight you can choose All the time, While I hold a key, or When I press a shortcut.
Hold mode lights the pointer only while Ctrl, Alt or Shift is down, and the key is still passed to your app, so ordinary shortcuts keep working. Shortcut mode flips the highlight from any program, with Ctrl+Alt+H as the starting combination. Separately, Fade out when the mouse rests can hide the mark after the pointer has been still for a few seconds; it reappears on the next movement.
