How to Highlight Mouse Clicks in a Screen Recording
Viewers lose the cursor constantly. Click-ripple highlights fix that in one setting — here’s exactly how they work and when to use them.
“Where did they just click?” is the single most common source of confusion in screen recordings — a cursor is a handful of pixels, and viewers lose it constantly, especially in dense interfaces. Click-ripple highlighting solves this directly.
What a click-ripple highlight actually does
Every time you left-click during a recording, an expanding animated ring appears at that exact point and fades out over roughly a second. It doesn’t change your workflow at all — you click normally, and the highlight happens automatically in the background.
Why this matters more than most editing tricks
Adding arrows or circles after recording, in a separate editor, is slow and easy to skip under deadline pressure. Because click highlights happen live, during recording, there is no extra editing step — the tutorial is legible from the first take.
When to also use a shape annotation instead
Click-ripples are perfect for buttons, links, and icons you’re actively clicking. For something you want to draw attention to without clicking — a status message, a result, a section of text — a rectangle or circle annotation is the better tool, since a ripple only appears on an actual click.
A simple rule of thumb
If you’re clicking it, ripple it. If you’re just pointing at it, circle it.
Used together, these two tools cover almost every situation where a viewer might otherwise ask “wait, what just happened?” — which is exactly the question a good tutorial should never leave unanswered.
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