How to Highlight Mouse Pointer Windows 10

hi everyone kevin here today i want to show you how you can highlight your mouse cursor this is a comment that i've gotten a lot from viewers like you asking me how i highlight my mouse cursor in my tutorial videos the benefit of highlighting your mouse cursor is it makes it easier for people to follow along with what you're explaining so they can see where your mouse goes they can more easily see what you're clicking on this is something that's valuable if let's say you're doing a screen recording with some type of instruction or maybe you're on a teams a zoom or google meet meeting where you're trying to explain some concept and you want people to follow along with what you're explaining the good news is it's pretty easy to create a highlight around your cursor and i'm going to show you two different ways how you can do that one of them doesn't require installing any software instead all we're going to do is we're going to load a cursor file into windows now when you look at your mouse on windows that's really just what's called a cursor file so it's kind of like a png or a gif or a jpeg and we're simply going to insert a cursor that has a halo around it so that's by far the easiest way to do it won't require installing anything the second approach requires installing software but it gives you a little bit more control you get a few more capabilities where you can adjust the size of the halo you can make it bigger smaller and it has a few other options the second one is the one that i personally use if there's one that you're more interested in you can use the chapters down below to jump to the section this video that you're most interested in all right well why don't we get to the point and i'll show you how to highlight your pointer here i am on my pc and first off i want to show you how you can add a halo around your mouse using functionality that's native to windows so first off let's go ahead to the taskbar on the bottom and within the search field go ahead and type in mouse this will bring up the best match for mouse settings let's go ahead and click on that this opens up the mouse settings dialog and within this dialog let's go over onto the right hand side and click on additional mouse options this opens up our mouse properties there are a whole bunch of tabs or pivots across the top let's click on the one that says pointers once we click on pointers you'll see all the default windows pointer icons so you're probably familiar with this and it shows all the different variations depending on the situation that you're in on windows what i want to do is i want to add a halo around this mouse cursor now windows by default comes with a whole bunch of different schemes for instance you could add a black cursor you could also invert it there are lots of different options here however by default windows doesn't have one that includes a halo around it but don't worry each one of these files here this is a cursor file like i said before you could think of that like a gif a png or jpeg it's simply an image file or a cursor file and what we want to do is we want to find a cursor file that has a halo around it so where do we find a cursor file with a halo around it well there are lots of websites online that let you download cursor files and one of my favorites is real world designer here's the real world designer website you can navigate there by going to rw-designer.com i also have a link in the description of this video if you just want to click on that on this website it looks a little dated it looks like a website from maybe the late 90s or early 2000s but there's lots of valuable content here now not only can we download cursor images on this site but they also provide software where you could create your own cursor files let's say that you have a knack for design you could take a stab at creating your very own cursor before i pulled together this video i went ahead and i tested out the cursor editor and i found that it was pretty easy to go ahead and create my own cursor but what we want to do is lots of people have already gone ahead and they've created these cursor files so let's go ahead and see what others have already created i'm going to go ahead and up on this top tab here i'm going to click on gallery within the gallery you'll see a wide assortment of different cursor files you could change your cursors to any one of these different options so you have lots of different options let's say you want a ghost or you want minecraft icons you can basically go through here to your heart's content and find something that matches your personality i want to get a halo around my mouse so let's go ahead and search for cursor highlight once it comes up i see a whole bunch of options here i'm going to go ahead and order this by downloads so i see what is the most popular here i see a whole bunch of cursors that have halos around them i can choose my color whether i want to go with a blue color a yellow a green i can even get a set of cursors now once again if i go back to the mouse properties you'll see that all these different cursors these make up a set of cursors so let's say i wanted a halo around all these different variations that can appear i could go ahead and download the set in this case just to keep things simple i'm going to go ahead and download the highlight cursor.cur file when i click on it this brings me to the download page it's a pretty small file it's only four to 4.2 kilobytes and it's a dot cur file now you don't have to worry about downloading this type of file there's really no risk to your computer a cur file is just like downloading say a png a jpeg or a gif it's simply a data file i'm going to go ahead and let's go ahead and download this file my highlight cursor has finished downloading i'm going to right click on this and i'm going to show it in my download folder i see here that the highlight cursor is in my download folder i could just leave it here and then browse to it in the mouse settings but if i'm planning on using this moving forward i'd rather put it in a more permanent location and i want to put it alongside all of my other cursor files what i'm going to do is press control x to cut this item i could also right click and then i'm going to go down to cut you could also copy if you want to do that but if you copy it'll leave the original file in your downloads folder i'm going to go ahead and cut next i'm going to click on my c drive this is where i have windows installed and i'm going to click on my windows folder and within windows there's another subfolder called cursors if we click on that you'll see all of your different cursor files that you have on your computer i'm going to go ahead now and right click and i'm going to paste my new cursor file in there it'll ask you to provide administrator permissions because you are modifying a folder within windows and i'm going to go ahead and click on continue so now you see that i have a new file alongside all my other cursor files called highlight cursor so that looks good let me jump back into settings back in settings now what i want to do is when i have normal select highlighted this is my standard mouse cursor i'm going to go to browse and within browse now i want to browse to the new file that i just added so i'm going to type in highlight cursor that'll bring me directly down to the file and now i'm going to click on open one of the things you'll see now is it has my mouse cursor with the halo around it as the normal select icon or the cursor one thing i could do now that i've loaded this in i could go ahead and save the scheme so let me click on save as and i'm simply going to call this mouse cursor highlight if i ever want to get rid of my mouse cursor highlight i simply click up on scheme and then i can go down to none and that'll restore the default again and that'll turn off the cursor highlighter and let's say i'm doing my presentation and i want people to be able to follow along more easily i simply click on scheme go to mouse cursor highlight and now let me turn off my other cursor highlighter now what i could do is i can click on apply and here now you'll see that my mouse cursor appears with a yellow halo around it once again once i'm done i go to no apply my halo is gone and here i can bring it back again that was the first technique for how you could apply a halo around your cursor using windows next i want to show you an application or some software that you can download that will give you even more control over what your cursor looks like and this is also free but it does require an install this is personally what i use in my tutorial videos to add a halo around my mouse open up your web browser and navigate to the following website now once again i have the website url in the description of this video you could simply click on that instead of typing this in now there's a tool developed by professor luke boiver at the university of puget sound he's an organic chemistry professor but on the side he went ahead and he developed a cursor highlighter tool to help with teaching his classes and to help his colleagues with teeth teaching their classes now the nice thing about this tool is it's completely free and it has quite a bit of functionality so many thanks to luke for pulling this together on his site what we're going to do is let's scroll down towards the bottom of the page and you'll see a tool called the cursor highlighter version 2.2 now what we need to do is to run the cursor highlighter first off we need to download an application called auto hotkey now here's auto hotkey so what is it well with autohotkey it's a free open source application that allows you to write custom scripts and luke has used this to create a tool that adds a halo around your mouse go ahead and first off install download and then install auto hotkey and once you've done that return to the website the boiver lab on this website then the next thing we want to do is download the ahk script now this is an auto hotkey file it's a script file that luke pulled together and we're going to download this and then run it i'm going to go ahead now and click on download he has a download file from drive.google.com let's go ahead and click on download it's finished downloading the cursor highlighter let's go ahead and view it in the folder i see in my downloads folder the cursor highlighter file to launch it all i have to do is double click on it now let's say that at some point i decide that i no longer need the cursor highlighter and i want to get rid of it all i have to do is delete this file and then i can also go back and uninstall the auto hotkey app if i don't have any other uses for it outside of the cursor highlighter let's go ahead and click on the cursor highlighter and before i do that i'm going to turn off the cursor highlighter that i'm currently using let's go ahead and double click on this when you double click on it you'll see a prompt appear that says whether you want to create a settings file now all of the settings we configure like the color of the halo the size of the halo any shortcut keys that you use to launch the cursor highlighter all of them are stored in the settings file so let's go ahead and click on yes once i click on yes you'll see now that my mouse has a yellow halo appearing around it so we have our halo that looks great and one of the benefits of using this software as opposed to the technique where you do it through windows is not only does my mouse arrow or cursor have the halo around it but here if i go to say resize a window all of the other cursors have the halo as well so within windows if you wanted this you'd have to add a halo for each individual icon or you'd have to load a cursor set with the halo here it simply applies it everywhere for you so it's a little bit easier to apply now i want to show some of the customizations for the cursor highlighter and to pull out the customizations let's go down to our taskbar and within the tray let's click on here and you'll see an icon that appears called the cursor highlighter it has a cursor icon in a blue circle if we right click on that it'll expose a whole bunch of settings for the cursor highlighter i could exit the cursor highlighter i could access the full set of settings and i also have some quick actions that i could take here if say i want to switch to a picture cursor or if i want to switch to cursor focus i'll show what those are in a moment let's jump into the broader settings menu here within settings there are a few different settings i want to highlight you have lots of different options here so feel free to peruse and play around with it to see what works for your needs i'll call out some of the ones that i think are most interesting here at the top there's a color highlight option and that's currently what i have i have my mouse cursor with a color highlighted around it next you could also have a picture file so let's say i'm presenting and let's say i'm writing on my screen with say a pen i can have a pen icon appear and lastly there's another option called focus when i click on that it inverts it where the focus is right around my cursor and everything else is grayed out i'm going to go ahead let's turn color highlight back on and then you have a few other settings down below you can experiment with those next i want to click on highlight settings now this is neat where you have control over first off how big the halo is so let's say i wanted to make a really big halo i could adjust the width and the height here i have a perfect circle but you could also make it more of an oval but there i have a massive highlight around my mouse you can also set the opacity and so what that means is if i set a high opacity level so if i make it opaque you won't be able to see through and then i can set it all the way so it's super low so you see a very light opacity around my cursor i'm going to set it to about the middle 125 i like that next you could also choose the highlight color and maybe before i do that let me just reduce the size of my halo here i could click on the highlight color and i could choose any color that i want maybe i'll go with more of a blue color here i kind of like blue i think it's a nice just soothing color now that we've looked at some of the highlight settings let's see what we could do here within highlight left click so here when i click my left mouse button currently nothing happens one thing i could do is i could hide the highlighting when i click so here i'll show an example when i click the halo disappears so this helps reinforce to your viewers that you're clicking on something alternatively i can make it stand out even more where i show a different color when i click so here i could click and there it changes it to a pinkish type color or a violet type color and here again i could also adjust the width the height and also the opacity as well as the color i could do the same on right click as well and then down here i have picture settings so previously we saw that there was a pin i could go ahead and load any picture that i want you could set the different colors the different size so lots of different controls for the picture that you add in and lastly there are also focus settings and once again i showed focus in the general view but here too you can set the size and the opacity for it the last thing i want to show within this view is you can also set different hotkeys to either turn on or turn off the highlighter the picture the focus so let's say you're giving a presentation maybe you want to start with the highlighting first and then you want people to really focus in on something you can set a hotkey where you then show the cursor focus so let me show an example so let's say for my cursor highlighter maybe i'll set control shift and let's go with the why don't we go with the let's say the f7 key and now i'm going to go ahead and save it so when i press ctrl shift f7 my cursor highlighter disappears when i click it again it brings it back so just a nice way i can either activate or deactivate the halo using shortcut keys without needing to open up the app and then manually turn it on or off if you're not a big fan of shortcut keys there is another neat way you could turn it on and off so down here on my taskbar if i go back to the tray i could simply click on the cursor highlighter and that turns it off or i could click on it again and that'll turn it on now let's say that i'm done with doing the cursor highlighting i could simply right click on this and then i could exit the cursor highlighter and that'll close it and then i'll no longer have the halo around my mouse i'm back on my desktop and there's one last thing i want to show now i personally use obs or open broadcaster software for all my screen recording there's one additional step that you have to take to make sure that obs can capture your mouse cursor i'm going to go ahead and open up obs i'm currently using it to record this tutorial here to make sure that obs can record your mouse you need to have a display capture set up now if this is your first time ever seeing obs but you're intrigued and you would like to use obs to record your screen i've done a video on it before and you can also find that in the description of this video that'll show you the basics of how to use obs so within obs assuming that you have some basic understanding of how to work it simply right click on display capture and go to properties within properties there's a check box here called capture cursor if i uncheck that you'll no longer see my cursor now this is kind of funny because i have the halo turned on on the cursor so you still see the halo but you no longer see the cursor if i check the box again now you see the cursor again so this also helps that when you're recording your screen using obs you want to make sure that this box is checked to make it as easy as possible for your audience to follow along alright well that was a quick look at how you can highlight your mouse cursor either using native functionality that's available as part of windows or using separate software that you can install that gives you a little bit more control and flexibility and that's the one that i personally use to highlight my mouse if you found this video helpful and you now know how to highlight your mouse please give this video a thumbs up if you want to see future videos like this hit that subscribe button that way you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out and lastly if there are any other video topics that you want to see me cover leave a comment down below that's how i build my list of videos to create all right well that's all i have for you today i hope you enjoyed and i hope to see you next time bye you

Channel: Kevin Stratvert

Views: 508,499

Rating: 4.9161701 out of 5

Keywords: kevin stratvert, mouse, pointer, highlight, cursor, point, highlight mouse cursor, highlight mouse pointer, tutorial, demo, obs, screen record, recoder, click, cursors, windows 10, highlighter, halo, circle, color, clicks, settings, focus mode, focus, picture, cur, design, designer, open broadcaster software, software, windows, microsoft, windows 7, windows 8, cursor icon, icon, script, video conferencing, download, install, ahk, autohotkey, auto hot key, task bar, tray, features, feature, how to, guide, help

Id: kwSqtNvT7to

Length: 18min 4sec (1084 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020