How to record a coding tutorial on Windows

To record a coding tutorial on Windows, make the code big enough to read on a phone, clear the screen of everything you are not using, and say what you are about to do before you do it. Then let the recorder do the tedious parts: show your shortcuts, caption your voice with the identifiers spelled right, and cut the pauses where you stopped to think. My name is Vince. I make Focal, a screen recorder for Windows, and more than once I have recorded myself typing a bug live while explaining, with complete confidence, why it worked. This guide is what those takes taught me, with Focal as the worked example. The setup half works with any recorder.

Set up the editor and terminal

Most of what makes a coding video watchable is decided before you press record. Your viewer sees your monitor shrunk to a phone held sideways, after compression has been hard on every thin line of text. At the font size you code at every day, your code reaches them as a soft grey texture.

• Raise the editor font size. Far past what you code at. Visual Studio Code, JetBrains IDEs and Cursor all let you set it. Around 18 to 22 is a good start for a 1080p video, about twice that on a 4K monitor at 100% scaling. Watch ten seconds of test footage on your phone before the real take.
• Pick a theme with contrast. Dark or light both work. Grey comments and dim line numbers are the first things compression smears.
• Hide the sidebars you are not using. Every column a file tree or a panel takes is a column the code does not get.
• Give the terminal the same font. Same family, a similar size, colors close to the editor theme, so a cut to the terminal does not look like it happened on someone else’s computer.
• Close the notifications. Turn on Do not disturb in Windows 11 (Focus assist in Windows 10) and quit chat and mail. A message preview over your code is hard to cut out cleanly.
• Close what you would not show. Files with keys in them, a terminal with tokens in its scrollback, browser tabs with customer data. Start from a fresh terminal.

Window or the whole screen

Record the window when the whole tutorial happens in one app. In Focal you press the shortcut and click the window to snap to it, and the recording can leave out the app’s own title bar, which Focal remembers per app. Two things to know: Windows 10 draws a yellow border around a recorded window that only Windows 11 can hide, and a window recording stops by itself, keeping what it has, if that window closes.

Record the whole screen (press Enter) or drag a region when you move between the editor, a terminal and a browser. A region can even span two monitors and record as one video, for anyone whose terminal lives on the other screen.

Mind the size. A whole 4K monitor exported at 1080p shows your text at half the size you see it. Raise the font further, or drag a region of about 1920 x 1080 around the part you use so the export is pixel for pixel. Zooms help, but they are no excuse for small code.

Record it

Narrate what you are about to do, not what you just did. Saying “now I’ll handle the empty list” before you type it lets the viewer read along. Describing it afterwards leaves your voice a step behind the screen. Silence while you type is fine: editing deals with it.

Keep a take per section. For a course that usually means one recording per lesson. In one long recording, pause between sections with the control bar. When a section goes wrong, restart that section rather than the video, and cut the bad take later.

In Focal, press Print Screen. If another program owns that key, such as OneDrive or ShareX, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and says so. Click the window or press Enter for the whole screen. A small panel sets the microphone, system audio, camera and keystrokes before each recording. Your choices are kept for next time, except Everything for keystrokes. After a countdown, a small control bar shows the time with pause and stop, and clicks on it never cause a zoom, so pausing does not earn a dramatic close-up of the pause button.

If your monitor runs in HDR, Focal captures it in full and converts it to SDR, so your theme looks in the video the way it looks to you.

When the terminal runs as administrator

A window run as administrator hides its clicks and keys from Focal unless Focal also runs as administrator. With an elevated terminal the video still shows it, but that stretch gets no click or typing zooms and no shortcut pills. Focal warns before recording such a window, and the editor marks the stretch so you know why. Run the terminal normally unless the tutorial really needs elevation, and when it does, start Focal as administrator for that recording.

Show your keystrokes

Viewers cannot see your hands. When a shortcut opens a panel or jumps to another file, the screen changes for no visible reason. To the viewer, F12 is a magic trick.

Focal’s Keystrokes setting is Off by default. Set it to Shortcuts before you record, and key combinations such as Ctrl+Shift+P, Ctrl+D or F12 show as a pill at the bottom or top of the video. The pills are timed with your cuts and speed changes. Ordinary typing is left out, which is right for code, since the editor already shows it.

There is also Everything, which shows all typing. For code I would leave it alone. It adds nothing the editor does not show, and the recording’s input log then keeps everything you typed, passwords included, which is why Focal warns before such a project is exported or shared.

Captions that spell code right

Many people watch tutorials with the sound off, and anyone who hears “use effect” wants to read useEffect, not “used affect”, which is a mood rather than a hook. Focal makes captions on your computer with a speech model that runs there, about 190 MB, downloaded the first time. It reads the words on screen as hints, so names like useEffect come out spelled as in your code when they are visible. It also leaves out the phrases speech models tend to make up over the sound of typing. When a line is still wrong, correct it in the editor.

Draw the captions into the picture, export them as a track viewers can switch on, or save an .srt to upload with the video. The captions section on the home page shows the looks, and how to add captions to a screen recording covers the rest.

Zooms on typing and clicks

When you stop, the editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and bursts of typing. Type into a function and the camera moves in on it. Zooms close together join into one that pans, so a run of edits down a file reads as one move rather than a camera that cannot make up its mind.

You choose what starts a zoom in the Zoom tab: clicks, right clicks, other buttons, typing, shortcuts and scrolling. If you scroll through long files, leave scrolling out. Changing these updates the automatic zooms at once, and zooms you edited or deleted stay that way. Press Z to add one by hand, and see how to add zoom effects to a screen recording for more.

Edit out the thinking

Every coding session has silences where you read an error or decide what to name something. On video they feel twice as long. Naming a variable, it turns out, takes just as long with an audience.

Focal edits by the transcript. Tighten long pauses and the silences shrink, but pauses where you click or type stay, so the typing remains while the staring goes. Cut every “um” and “uh” in one click. Select a false start in the captions list and cut it from the video like text.

For typing that runs long, split the clip on the timeline and speed it up. Your voice keeps its normal pitch. Voice cleanup, two switches in the Audio tab, removes background noise and evens out loudness to the level web video is mixed at.

Chapters for every section

Press Ctrl+Alt+M at the start of each section while you record. Markers become chapters. The exported file carries them, so video players can jump between them, and a click copies them as YouTube timestamps for the description, which beats scrubbing back through your own video with a notepad. A style can also show chapter titles on screen.

Your camera, out of the way of the code

For a YouTube tutorial or a course, a face in the corner helps people stay. Switch the camera on before you record. In Focal it shows as a circle, a rounded square, or a wide or tall rectangle, in sync with your voice. Size it and drag it anywhere in the preview, usually to the right, where lines of code rarely reach. While you record, a live bubble shows you the camera and never appears in the recording. The camera section shows the shapes.

Captions and the shortcut pill both want the bottom edge, and neither is good at sharing. Put one at the top.

Export for YouTube, a course or your team

Export MP4 at 1080p and 60 fps with the YouTube preset. Sixty frames a second keeps scrolling and the cursor smooth. If you recorded a 4K monitor, pick 4K under Size: the upload is longer, and small text stays sharper after YouTube compresses it. Focal exports H.264 or HEVC up to 4K at 60 fps. H.264 plays everywhere, so use it for a course platform or a team drive.

A short clip in a pull request is a different job, for a smaller audience with stronger opinions, covered in screen recordings for READMEs and pull requests.

Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, no time limit and no account, and exporting needs a license. Download the trial, set Keystrokes to Shortcuts, and record one section first.