How to add a cursor highlighter on Windows 10

If you need to make your cursor more visible on your screen, you can customize it so that it’s larger and a bright color that’s much easier to see on the screen. Unfortunately, this highlight color isn’t always caught in screenshots or screencasts and the size doesn’t show up at all. If you need a more visible cursor highlight on Windows 10, you can add a circle around it. To do this, you need an app called PenAttention.

Add cursor highlight

Download PenAttention and install it. It runs in the system tray where you can access its settings. Right-click it and select Highlight settings. The app adds a circle around your pointer and you can customize every aspect of it.

By default, the color is opaque but you can reduce the opacity and make it translucent. You can also change the color to whatever you. Click inside the color box, and change it to what looks good on your desktop. The ‘Circle’ option lets you change the size of the circle around your pointer. Increase the radius to make it bigger. If you prefer to use a Rectangle, select it and set its size to whatever works for you.

Lastly, enable the ‘Highlight mouse as well as pen’ option so that it works for the mouse cursor.

Those are all the options you need to tinker with to get the app running. You can see how the app works in the screenshot below. In screenshots and in screen recordings, not to mention during presentations, the cursor highlight will show up.

Presentation software normally supports something like this but no other app type does. If you need to share your screen and highlight the cursor, this is a pretty good way to do it.

The app does have a limitation; screen scaling. If your screen is scaled to anything above 100%, the highlight will be detached from the cursor. The app has been built to work on Windows  10 however, it doesn’t play nice with the scaling feature. The scaling feature isn’t new. It’s been a part of Windows 10 from day one and yet the app doesn’t support it.

If you’ve scaled your display, you will have to reduce it back to 100%. There’s no other way to get the app to work correctly. The alternative is to try a different app. There are other, paid apps that do the job like PointerFocus though it costs $12. It has a trial version that you can try out and if it works better than PenAttention, it may be worth the price.