How to hide (or smooth) the cursor in a Mac screen recording

People who search for this usually want one of three things: the cursor gone, the cursor calmer, or the clicks visible. macOS covers only the third one out of the box, and the toggle that looks like it should hide the pointer doesn’t apply to video. Here is what each tool actually does, free options first, with every claim dated.

The short answer

• Hide the cursor entirely, free: OBS Studio → macOS Screen Capture source → uncheck Show cursor. The built-in Shift-Command-5 recorder and QuickTime can’t do it.
• Hide it only when it’s idle or while you type: Sgrin (both on by default) or Screen Studio (“Hide cursor if it’s not moving”).
• Smooth, resize or restyle it: Sgrin, Screen Studio or CleanShot X — the recorders that capture the cursor as data and redraw it.
• Highlight clicks, free: Shift-Command-5 → Options → Show Mouse Clicks.

Prices and options below were checked on October 20, 2026; the dated source list is at the end.

What macOS itself can and can’t do

The Shift-Command-5 toolbar (the Screenshot app) has an Options menu whose contents change with the mode you pick. Apple’s own guide puts it this way: “the available options vary based on whether you’re taking a screenshot or a screen recording”, and the two cursor-related entries are Show Mouse Pointer and Show Mouse Clicks. The pointer toggle is documented in terms of stills — “if you don’t want the mouse pointer included in the picture, choose Show Mouse Pointer so that the checkmark disappears” — while clicks are the option that belongs to recordings.

That matches what the system itself ships. On macOS 27.0.1 (checked October 20, 2026), the English interface strings of the Screenshot toolbar contain exactly those two cursor options, plus Timer, Microphone, Remember Last Selection, Show Floating Thumbnail, and the HDR capture format — nothing resembling “hide pointer in recording”. QuickTime Player’s own strings on the same system have a single cursor-related option, Show Mouse Clicks in Recording, and no pointer toggle at all; its File → New Screen Recording command opens the same Shift-Command-5 toolbar anyway.

In practice: a native recording always includes the pointer. This has been the case since the toolbar arrived with Mojave — Apple’s community forums have a 2019 thread literally titled “Screen Recording – How to Hide the Cursor” whose answer is “use a third-party app” — and nothing in macOS 27’s options changes it.

Two honest workarounds if you want to stay on the built-in tool:

1. Keep the pointer out of the frame. With Record Selected Portion, only what’s inside your rectangle is recorded. Park the pointer outside it and drive the demo from the keyboard.
2. Accept the cursor and make it useful. Turn on Show Mouse Clicks so the viewer at least sees where you clicked.

If neither works for you, the next section is the free fix.

Job 1 — Hide the cursor completely

Free: OBS Studio

OBS is free and open source, and its macOS capture source exposes exactly the switch macOS hides. The option is wired straight into ScreenCaptureKit — OBS passes your choice to the stream configuration’s showsCursor flag — so the cursor is left out of the frames before they ever reach the recording. No post-processing, no mask.

1. In Sources, click + and add macOS Screen Capture.
2. Pick the method — Display Capture for the whole screen, or Window Capture / Application Capture for a single app.
3. In the source’s properties, uncheck Show cursor (it’s on by default).
4. Start recording.

If the cursor still shows up, make sure you’re using the ScreenCaptureKit-based macOS Screen Capture source and not the legacy Display Capture source; a 2020 bug report (obs-studio #3961) concerned the old one. OBS needs the Screen Recording permission in System Settings like any recorder.

The trade-off is that OBS records raw pixels. Hiding the cursor is all it does to the cursor: there is no smoothing, no click effects, no zoom. For a cursor-free tutorial or a clean UI loop that is often exactly right.

Paid: CleanShot X and Screen Studio

• CleanShot X ($35 one-time, includes a year of updates, $19/year after that; macOS 13 or later) lists Show/Hide cursor among its screen-recording settings.
• Screen Studio ($29 per month, or $9 per month billed yearly — $108 a year; no one-time license for new customers) has Hide cursor (“completely removes the cursor from your recording”) and can also hide it for a single fragment: select the segment, right-click, Hide mouse cursor.

Sgrin: not this one

Sgrin has no “always hide” switch. It can hide the cursor when idle and while you type (next section), but if the brief is “no cursor anywhere in the video”, Sgrin is not the tool for that today — OBS, CleanShot X or Screen Studio are.

Job 2 — Hide it only when it isn’t doing anything

Often the cursor isn’t the problem; the parked cursor is — sitting over a button while you talk. Two recorders handle that without removing it from the moments that matter.

• Sgrin ($29.99 once, Early Adopter price; 14-day trial, no card) has Hide when idle and Hide while typing, both on by default. With idle hiding, the cursor fades out after about two seconds without movement and comes back on the next move; with typing hiding, it disappears while keystrokes are coming in and returns when they stop. Both are toggles in the Cursor panel of the editor, so you decide per project.
• Screen Studio has the equivalent Hide cursor if it’s not moving (“automatically hides the cursor when it’s idle”).
• CleanShot X does not advertise an idle-hide option.
• Shift-Command-5, QuickTime, OBS: nothing of the kind — the cursor is either always there or (OBS) never there.

Job 3 — Smooth the cursor instead of hiding it

A shaky cursor path is the most common reason a recording looks amateur, and no amount of hiding fixes it when the cursor has to be visible. Smoothing requires a different architecture: the recorder captures the cursor as a separate track (position and shape over time) and redraws it on export. Pixel recorders — the macOS toolbar, QuickTime, OBS — can’t do it, because the cursor is already baked into the image.

• Sgrin records the cursor as its own track and redraws it. The Cursor panel has Smoothing with three intensities (Smooth / Medium / Strong), an Even out motion control that spreads short pauses over the movement while leaving clicks and drags where you made them, a Size slider from 0.5× to 3×, a Style choice (System, Arrow, Hand), and Ignore quick shape changes so the pointer doesn’t flicker between I-beam and arrow over a text field. Everything is live in the preview and identical in the export.
• Screen Studio records without the cursor and adds it back in post, which is why it can smooth by default (“shaky movement becomes a steady glide”), resize it, switch between macOS and Touch cursor types, remove cursor shakes, and optimize original cursor types to cut rapid shape changes. Its polish here is still the reference point; see Sgrin vs Screen Studio for the full trade-off.
• CleanShot X’s video editor can “clean up shaky cursor movement” and change cursor size, style and click effects. The comparison with Sgrin is in Sgrin vs CleanShot X.
• Cap (free for personal use; $29/year or $58 once for the desktop license; open source, macOS/Windows/Linux) offers cursor size, style, animations and motion blur in its editor. A hide-cursor option isn’t advertised.

Job 4 — Highlight clicks (and keystrokes)

• Free: Shift-Command-5 → choose a recording mode → Options → Show Mouse Clicks. macOS draws a circle around each click. QuickTime’s legacy recorder calls it Show Mouse Clicks in Recording. Not configurable, but it works and costs nothing.
• Sgrin: a Clicks section with Ring, Pulse or Target effects (or none), with color and size controls; clicks also drive the automatic zoom — see the auto-zoom overview. A Show keys option renders your keystrokes as keycaps on the video.
• CleanShot X: Capture Clicks (color, size, outline or filled style, animation on/off) and Capture Keystrokes (position, size, dark/light style, all keys or command keys only).
• Screen Studio: documents a mouse click sound; its cursor guide doesn’t list a visual click highlight.

Side by side

All data checked on October 20, 2026. ”—” means the option is not offered; “n/a” means not advertised and not tested here.

Tool	Price (Oct 20, 2026)	Hide cursor entirely	Hide when idle / typing	Smooth & restyle	Click effects
Shift-Command-5 / QuickTime	Free (built in)	— (pointer toggle is for screenshots)	—	—	Show Mouse Clicks (fixed circle)
OBS Studio	Free, open source	Yes — uncheck Show cursor	—	—	—
Cap	Free (personal) · $29/yr or $58 once	n/a	n/a	Size, style, animations, motion blur	n/a
Sgrin	$29.99 once (Early Adopter; $59.99 later)	—	Yes — idle (~2 s) and while typing, on by default	Yes — 3 smoothing levels, even-out motion, size 0.5–3×, System/Arrow/Hand, shape stability	Ring / Pulse / Target, color, size
CleanShot X	$35 once + $19/yr for updates after year one	Yes — Show/Hide cursor	n/a	Yes — “clean up shaky cursor movement”, size, style	Capture Clicks (color, size, style, animation) + keystrokes
Screen Studio	$29/mo · $9/mo billed yearly ($108/yr)	Yes — whole video or per fragment	Yes — “if it’s not moving”	Yes — smooth by default, remove shakes, optimize cursor types	Click sound documented; visual highlight n/a

Requirements worth knowing before you choose: Sgrin needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later on Apple Silicon and is a 6 MB download; CleanShot X needs macOS 13 or later and ships no trial (30-day money-back instead); Screen Studio is macOS-only; OBS and Cap also run on Windows and Linux.

Which one, in one line each

• You just want the cursor gone, and you’re not paying: OBS.
• You want it gone and you also take a lot of screenshots: CleanShot X — it’s still the stronger screenshot tool, and Sgrin doesn’t compete there.
• You want a cursor that looks deliberate — calm path, visible clicks, out of the way when idle — in a demo that ends up with a device mockup and zooms, for a one-time price: Sgrin. Accept that it can’t hide the cursor for the whole clip.
• You want the most polished cursor treatment available and the subscription doesn’t bother you: Screen Studio.

If the one-time-versus-subscription question matters to your choice, the dated table of licence models for every Mac recorder lives in Screen recorders: one-time purchase vs subscription.

Sources (checked October 20, 2026)

• Apple, Mac User Guide for macOS 27: Take screenshots or screen recordings on Mac — Options menu, “Show Mouse Pointer”, options vary by mode.
• Apple, QuickTime Player User Guide: Record your screen.
• macOS 27.0.1 (build 26A434), local inspection of the Screenshot toolbar’s and QuickTime Player’s English interface strings — “Show Mouse Pointer”, “Show Mouse Clicks”, “Show Mouse Clicks in Recording”.
• Apple Support Communities, Screen Recording – How to Hide the Cursor (2019); Stack Overflow, QuickTime X — how to hide mouse during screen capture.
• OBS Studio source, plugins/mac-capture/mac-sck-video-capture.m (show_cursor property, default true, applied via setShowsCursor:) and data/locale/en-US.ini (“Show cursor”); bug report obs-studio #3961 (legacy Display Capture, 2020).
• Screen Studio: Cursor guide, Hiding the cursor in specific sections, pricing on screen.studio.
• CleanShot X: Features, Pricing.
• Cap: Pricing, Features.
• Sgrin: Cursor and Clicks panels of the shipped 0.9.1 build (English interface strings of the published DMG, checked October 20, 2026) and its source — idle and typing hiding on by default, idle fade after 2.0 s; price, trial and requirements from sgrin.app.