Ahmad Awais

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Ahmad Awais

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Screencasting Tip: Auto Hide Cursor on macOS

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais

When recording a screencast (video tutorial) I like to hide my cursor. It’s distracting to see a cursor hanging around for no reason. Leads to a bad user experience, many times you think of it as your own cursor and try to move it away while watching a video โ€” only to realize it’s not yours, and you’re stuck with it.

Trick Escape#

A little known trick to hide your cursor on macOS is to press the esc (escape) key. It generally works in many apps, but sometimes it does not. Though you can get by without installing anything.

Tip with an App#

When I am recording, I only want to focus on what I’m teaching. I love to teach, you can check out my How to build a Node CLI and VSCode Power User courses. So, instead of using the esc key trick, I use an app.

Cursorcerer is an app that allows you to hide your cursor with a global hotkey. It can also autohide an idle cursor and bring it back as soon as you move the mouse.

That’s what I like. After 3 seconds of inactivity, my cursor is gone until I move it again. So handy! You can take a look at how I set this app below.

Cursorcerer

Software

Founder & CEO of Langbase.com โ€” The most powerful serverless AI agents developer platform to build, deploy, and scale AI agents with tools and memory ยท Creator of BaseAI.

Check out the State of AI Agents.

Ex VP DevTools & DevRel Eng. Rapid ยท Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. ๐Ÿง‘โ€๐Ÿ’ป AI/ML/DevTools Angel Investor โฏ AI/ML Advisory Board San Francisco, DevNetwork

๐ŸŽฉ Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate ๐ŸฆŠ Google Developers Expert Web DevRel ๐Ÿš€ NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor ๐Ÿ† 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 5x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

๐ŸŒณ Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. ๐Ÿ“Ÿ Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation and VSCode.pro course. Over 142 million views, 24 yrs Blogging, 108K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

โœŒ๏ธ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide โ“ฆ WordPress Core Developer ๐Ÿ“ฃ TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

โœจ As quoted by: Satya Nadella ยท CEO of Microsoft โ€” Awais is an awesome example for developers.
๐Ÿ’œ Loves his wife (Maedah) โฏ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

๐Ÿ‘‹โ€ฆ Awais is mostly active on ๐• @MrAhmadAwais

๐Ÿ“จ

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Comments 13
  • Furqan Anwar
    Posted on

    Furqan Anwar Furqan Anwar

    Reply Author

    What about windows ? Any preferred software?.



  • Awais
    Posted on

    Awais Awais

    Reply Author

    Unfortunately, not a windows user.