How to Hide the Mouse Cursor in a Mac Recording

Sometimes the cursor is the point of a screen recording, and sometimes it is litter. A UI animation, a scrolling design review, a background loop on a landing page — an arrow parked in the middle of the frame ruins all three.

macOS has no single "hide cursor" switch, which is why this is a search at all. There are four workable approaches and they suit genuinely different situations.

Quick comparison

The second row is the one to prefer whenever it is available, because a decision you can undo beats a decision you cannot.

First: decide whether you actually want it gone

Worth thirty seconds, because removing the cursor is often the wrong call.

Keep it for anything instructional. The cursor is how a viewer follows what you are doing; a tutorial without it forces people to hunt for what changed. If the cursor is distracting in a tutorial, the fix is usually to steady it rather than remove it — park it when you are not pointing at something.

Remove it for ambient and decorative footage: a loop on a landing page, a UI animation you are showing off, a scrolling walkthrough of a design, a background clip behind text.

Restyle it for the large middle ground. A cursor that is too small to see, jittery, or the wrong colour against your UI reads as noise; the same cursor enlarged, smoothed and recoloured reads as a pointer. That is a different fix from hiding.

Method 1: turn it off before recording

Most recorders can simply not draw the pointer.

macOS Screenshot toolbar (⇧⌘5). There is no hide option — only Show Mouse Clicks, which adds click circles. The pointer itself is always captured. This is the main reason people go looking for alternatives.

QuickTime Player. Same. Movie/screen recording always includes the cursor.

OBS Studio. Select your Display Capture or Window Capture source, open its Properties, and untick Show Cursor. This is clean, works reliably, and covers the hide cursor obs case directly. Note it is a per-source setting — if you have several capture sources, untick it on each.

Step by step in OBS: Sources panel → right-click your capture source → Properties → uncheck Show Cursor → OK. Test with a five-second recording before the real take.

Good for: knowing in advance that you never want the pointer.

Bad for: changing your mind. Once recorded without a cursor, there is no way to add one back, and you will occasionally discover mid-edit that one section needed it.

Method 2: toggle it off after recording

Better, when the tool supports it, because nothing is destroyed.

Some recorders capture the cursor as a separate layer — position and clicks stored as data alongside the video, drawn at render time. When the cursor is data rather than baked pixels, hiding it is a checkbox, and you can change your mind at any point before export.

Screenify Studio works this way. The Hide cursor toggle sits in the clip properties panel and applies per clip, so a single project can show the pointer through the instructional section and hide it through the ambient one — a distinction that is impossible if you decided before recording. It works on imported clips as well as its own recordings.

The same layer is what makes the alternatives to hiding possible: cursor size, recolouring, a glossy 3D pointer, tilt in the direction of travel, click rings and click sounds — all adjustable after the fact because none of it was burned into the frames.

Good for: anything where the answer might be different in different parts of the video.

Bad for: macOS only, and imported footage keeps only what it carried. A video recorded elsewhere has the cursor already in its pixels, so hiding it there means covering or cropping, not toggling.

Method 3: move it out of frame

Unglamorous and frequently the correct answer.

If you are recording a region or a window, park the cursor outside the capture area. It cannot appear in a frame it is not in. For a scripted animation or a scroll-through, this needs no tooling at all.

Two ways to drive the screen without the pointer inside the frame:

• Keyboard. Scroll with arrow keys, Page Down or space. Navigate with Tab. Trigger actions with shortcuts rather than clicks.
• A second display. Put the cursor on the other screen while the recording captures this one.

For a scripted scroll, this is often better than hiding, because it also removes the movement — a hidden cursor still scrolls the page in a way that betrays a hand, and a keyboard scroll is smoother and more even than a trackpad one.

Good for: ambient loops, scroll-throughs, UI animations.

Bad for: anything requiring clicks inside the frame.

Method 4: hide the pointer system-wide

The blunt instrument, for when nothing above fits — a recorder with no cursor setting, or a capture path you do not control.

macOS hides the pointer automatically after a few seconds of inactivity in some contexts, but there is no supported global toggle. Options:

Cursorcerer and similar utilities add a hotkey or an idle timer to hide the pointer. Free, small, and they work at the window-server level so any recorder sees the result.

A transparent cursor. You can set a fully transparent pointer image through accessibility tooling. Effective, and genuinely disorienting to work with — remember to change it back.

defaults commands. Various snippets circulate claiming to hide the cursor via defaults write. Most target settings Apple has since removed, and the ones that still parse mostly do nothing. Treat with suspicion and verify with a test recording before relying on one for real work.

Good for: an uncooperative recorder.

Bad for: everyday use — you have hidden your own pointer as well as the recorded one, and forgetting to restore it is a memorable ten minutes.

Covering a cursor that is already baked in

If the pointer is in the pixels of a file you cannot re-record, there are three honest options and none of them is clean.

Crop it out. Works only if the cursor stays in one area — a corner, or outside the region you actually need. Crop to the useful part and accept the smaller frame. Fast, lossless, and the only one that leaves no artefact.

Cover it. Place a small shape over the cursor's path, keyframed to follow it. Convincing when the background behind the pointer is flat and uniform, and obviously fake over text or a gradient. Time-consuming for anything longer than a few seconds.

Blur or clone the region. Some editors have a tracked blur. It removes the arrow shape and leaves a soft smudge travelling across the frame, which most viewers find more distracting than the cursor was.

The realistic assessment: for a two-second shot, cover it. For anything longer, re-record. The effort curve on cursor removal is steep and the results get worse as the clip gets longer, which is the opposite of how you want a fix to behave.

This is the practical argument for choosing a recorder that keeps the cursor as data before you need it, rather than after.

The alternatives to hiding, which are usually better

If the cursor bothers you in an instructional video, these fix the actual problem.

Make it larger. System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Pointer size. A slightly larger pointer is far easier to follow once the video is scaled into a web page, and nobody notices it is enlarged.

Change its colour. The same pane allows a custom fill and outline. A white pointer on a light UI is invisible; give it a dark outline and it reads everywhere.

Smooth its movement. Raw pointer paths are jittery. Recorders that store the cursor as data can interpolate a smooth path between targets, which is most of what makes a polished demo feel polished.

Add click indicators. A ring on each click tells the viewer something happened here, which is the information a cursor is meant to convey in the first place.

Park it while you talk. Free, and the highest-impact habit on this list. Idle drift while you explain something is the single most distracting cursor behaviour, and no setting fixes it.

Why there is no simple switch

Worth understanding, because it explains why the methods above are so uneven.

On macOS the pointer is not drawn by the app you are recording. It is composited by the window server, on its own layer, above everything else. A screen capture API can be asked to include or exclude that layer — ScreenCaptureKit exposes exactly that as a capture option — but the app doing the recording has to ask.

That single design fact produces every behaviour on this page:

• OBS can toggle it because it sets the capture option per source.
• The Screenshot toolbar and QuickTime cannot because Apple never surfaced the option in their interfaces, even though the underlying API supports it.
• Some recorders can toggle it after the fact because they capture without the cursor layer and record the pointer's position as data, then draw it at render time. Hiding it is then simply not drawing it.
• A file from anywhere else cannot be cleaned because by the time you have an MP4, the pointer is ordinary pixels indistinguishable from the UI beneath it.

If you are choosing tooling and you care about this, the question to ask is not "can it hide the cursor" but "does it record the cursor as pixels or as data". Everything else follows.

Recording without a cursor on purpose: a short workflow

For an ambient loop — the kind that sits behind text on a landing page — this sequence produces clean footage in one take.

Step 1 — size the window to the output. If the loop will render 1200px wide, make the window roughly that. Scaling down afterwards blurs text and wastes bytes.

Step 2 — turn on Do Not Disturb. A notification in a loop that plays forever is a permanent mistake.

Step 3 — park the pointer outside the capture region. Or on a second display.

Step 4 — drive with the keyboard. Space or Page Down for scrolling, Tab to move focus, shortcuts for actions. Keyboard scrolling is also more even than a trackpad, which matters on a loop where uneven motion is noticeable on the third viewing.

Step 5 — record longer than you need, then trim to a section where the motion starts and ends in a similar place. A loop that jumps at the seam is worse than a loop that is slightly too short.

Step 6 — check the first and last frames match closely enough that the cut is invisible.

None of that requires a cursor setting at all, which is the point — for ambient footage, avoiding the pointer is more reliable than hiding it.

Troubleshooting

Unticking Show Cursor in OBS did nothing. It is per-source. Check every capture source in the scene, and confirm you edited the source that is actually visible rather than a duplicate.

The cursor is hidden but click effects still show. Click rings are frequently a separate setting from the pointer. Turn both off.

The cursor disappears in the preview but appears in the export. Preview and render paths disagreeing — a real class of bug. Always confirm with a short test export rather than trusting the preview.

I hid it and now the video is confusing. Expected for instructional content. Restore it, and steady it instead.

A hidden cursor still leaves a visible hover state. Hiding the pointer does not stop the effects of the pointer — buttons still highlight on hover, tooltips still appear. If you need a completely inert screen, drive it with the keyboard.

Only some clips lost the cursor. If your tool has a per-clip toggle, that is the toggle. Check each clip rather than a global setting.

The cursor is in my imported video and I cannot remove it. It is in the pixels. Options are crop, cover, or re-record. Nothing can extract a burned-in cursor cleanly.

FAQ

How do I hide the mouse cursor in a Mac screen recording? Not with the built-in tools — the Screenshot toolbar and QuickTime always capture it. Use a recorder with a cursor setting, untick Show Cursor in OBS, or keep the pointer outside the recorded region.

Can I hide the cursor in QuickTime screen recording? No. QuickTime has no option for it. Record with a different tool, or keep the pointer out of frame.

How do I hide the cursor in OBS? Source Properties → uncheck Show Cursor. It applies per source, so repeat for each capture source in the scene.

Can I remove the cursor after recording? Only if the recorder stored the cursor as a separate layer rather than burning it into the frames. Screenify Studio has a per-clip Hide cursor toggle for exactly this. A file from a tool that baked it in cannot be cleaned up afterwards.

Is there a macOS setting to hide the pointer everywhere? No supported global toggle. Third-party utilities such as Cursorcerer add a hotkey. Most defaults write snippets circulating for this no longer do anything.

Should I hide the cursor in a tutorial? Usually not. It is how viewers follow along. If it is distracting, enlarge it, recolour it, and stop moving it while you talk.

Why is my cursor tiny in the recording? You captured a Retina display and the video is being shown smaller. Increase pointer size before recording, or record a region at the size you will publish.

Does hiding the cursor reduce file size? Negligibly. A moving cursor changes a handful of pixels per frame. See why screen recordings are so large for what actually drives size.

Can I hide the cursor for part of a recording only? Only in a tool that stores the cursor as data and applies the setting per clip rather than per project. If the pointer was baked in at capture time, the whole recording has it or none of it does.

Will hiding the cursor also hide click effects? Not necessarily. Click rings, ripples and click sounds are usually separate settings from the pointer itself. Turn each off individually, and check an export rather than the preview.

Does the cursor appear in an iOS Simulator recording? No. simctl and the Simulator's own recording capture the device screen, where there is no pointer — taps appear only if you have enabled a touch indicator. Screen-recording the Simulator window from macOS is different, and there your Mac pointer is included.

Is there a way to hide the cursor only when it stops moving? Not natively. macOS hides the pointer during video playback and full-screen presentations, but there is no general idle-hide. Utilities such as Cursorcerer add an idle timer if you need one.

The short version

For ambient footage, keep the pointer out of the capture region and drive the screen with the keyboard — simplest, and it removes the movement as well as the arrow.

For everything else, prefer a tool where hiding is a toggle you can undo rather than a decision baked in at record time. And before you hide it in a tutorial, try making it bigger and holding it still. That fixes the actual complaint most of the time.

Related reading: Screen recorders that zoom in · Programs like OBS for Mac · Screen recording for beginners