Why the pointer disappears on a shared screen
Your pointer is roughly 20 pixels tall. Share a 27-inch display into a call and the whole desktop is scaled down to fit someone's window – so that pointer arrives as a handful of pixels, then gets compressed for bandwidth. It is not that your audience is not paying attention. It is that there is almost nothing there to see.
Compression makes it worse: a small, fast-moving, high-contrast object is exactly what video encoders throw away first. Which is why the pointer often vanishes precisely when you move it, the moment you are trying to point at something.
Make the pointer bigger
- Open System Settings.
- Choose Accessibility, then Display.
- Scroll to the Pointer section and drag Pointer size up.
For everyday work, one notch up is plenty. For presenting, go further than feels comfortable – roughly a third of the way along the slider. It will look slightly silly on your display and land correctly on everyone else's.
This is captured in recordings and screen shares, because the pointer is drawn as part of the screen. Unlike display zoom, nothing is lost on the way out.
Give it a colour that survives any background
In the same panel: Pointer outline colour and Pointer fill colour. The default black outline with white fill is a reasonable compromise and loses to both dark IDE themes and bright white documents.
For presenting, a saturated fill with a contrasting outline – for instance a strong yellow fill with a black outline – stays readable over anything. There is a Reset button right there, so experimenting costs nothing.
Test it against your worst background, not your desktop. If you demo a dark editor and a white web app in the same session, the pointer has to work on both.
Shake to locate
Also in Accessibility → Display → Pointer: Shake mouse pointer to locate. Wiggle the mouse or flick on the trackpad, and the pointer briefly balloons to several times its size.
It is genuinely useful on a large or multi-display setup and it does record. Two caveats: the enlargement is momentary, so it answers "where is it" rather than "follow me", and shaking the pointer at an audience is visually noisy if you do it every twenty seconds.
Show clicks in recordings
Viewers cannot hear your trackpad. Without click indicators, a recording is full of moments where something changes and nobody knows why.
- Screenshot toolbar: press ⇧⌘5, open Options, and turn on showing mouse clicks before you start recording.
- QuickTime Player: File → New Screen Recording has the same option in its recording options.
- OBS and streaming tools: no built-in click display – you need a plugin or a separate app.
- Live calls: no call app shows your clicks. Whatever you use has to draw them on your own screen for them to travel.
That last point is the one people miss. Click indicators built into a recorder only exist in that recorder's output. They do nothing during a Zoom or Teams share.
Spotlight: dim everything but the pointer
The other approach: instead of making the pointer louder, make everything else quieter. A soft circle of normal brightness around the pointer, with the rest of the screen dimmed. The eye goes straight to the bright spot, and it survives compression and downscaling far better than a small moving object does.
macOS has no built-in spotlight, so this needs an app. Several exist – Mouseposé is the long-standing one, Presentify includes it, and Gaze has it as part of its Highlight kit along with click ripples and cursor styles.
Because a spotlight is drawn into the screen, it records and it screen-shares. Being clear about the trade: a dimmed screen is dramatic, and it is wrong for a working session where people need to see the whole layout. Use it when attention needs to be in one place, not as a permanent setting.
Three habits that beat any setting
- Move the pointer deliberately. Land it where you mean, then stop. Constant drift is what makes people lose it. Fast circles around a button are worse than pointing once and holding still.
- Say what you are pointing at. "The Advanced button, bottom right" beats "this one here" and costs nothing.
- Park it out of the way when you are not using it. A pointer sitting on the text people are reading is a distraction you did not intend.
A bigger pointer makes you easier to follow. These make you easy to follow. They are not the same thing.