Highlight where you click in a Mac screen recording

A good product demo lives or dies on one detail: can the viewer see the exact button you pressed? Without a click highlight, your pointer glides across the UI and things just happen. Turn on Show Mouse Clicks and macOS draws a circle at the pointer the instant you click — the small polish that separates a demo that lands from one people rewatch in confusion.

Add the click circle

1. Press Shift+Cmd+5 to bring up the recording toolbar.
2. Click Options.
3. Tick Show Mouse Clicks near the bottom of the menu.
4. Pick your capture area and hit Record.

Now every click during the take gets a highlight: a translucent dark ring that expands from the pointer and settles, then fades a beat later. It reads as intentional, not busy — enough to draw the eye to the target without covering the button underneath. macOS keeps the option checked, so a demo series stays visually consistent from clip to clip.

Set it once from Terminal

If you build demos on a schedule, set the highlight as a default so it's on before you even open the toolbar:

# Highlight clicks in every screen recording
defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-clicks -bool true
killall SystemUIServer

# Remove the highlight again
defaults write com.apple.screencapture show-clicks -bool false
killall SystemUIServer

This preference and the Show Mouse Clicks checkbox are one and the same, so changing it here updates the toolbar and vice versa. The behaviour is identical across macOS 13 Ventura, 14 Sonoma, and 15 Sequoia.

Make the highlight actually help

A click circle is only as clear as the motion around it. A few habits make the highlight do its job:

• Slow down before each click. Let the pointer arrive, pause, then click — the ring has room to register instead of being lost in a fast drag.
• Don't rely on it for keystrokes. The highlight marks pointer clicks, not typing. If a step is a keyboard shortcut, say it aloud or add a caption in editing.
• Keep it for QuickTime too. QuickTime's New Screen Recording uses this same engine, so the circle appears there without any extra setup.

One thing the highlight won't do is change your cursor size — if the pointer itself is hard to spot on a busy interface, that's a separate setting. Together, a larger pointer and a click ring make a demo legible even on a small embedded player.

One expectation to set: the highlight's look is fixed. macOS draws the same dark ring for left clicks, right clicks, and trackpad taps — you can't recolour it, resize it, or turn it into a ring-plus-ripple like some third-party tools do. That uniformity is fine for most demos, but if your brand needs a specific colour or a keystroke overlay, that's the point where a dedicated screen-recording app earns its place. For a straight, no-install "show where I clicked," the built-in ring is exactly enough.

Make the pointer easy to spot too

If your cursor gets lost against the interface even with a click ring, bump its size. See how to increase the cursor size on Mac — a slightly larger pointer plus a click highlight keeps a demo readable on any screen.