How to record your screen without the cursor on Windows

To record your screen without the cursor on Windows, switch the cursor off in your recorder before you press record. Xbox Game Bar has an option for it in Windows Settings under Gaming > Captures, and OBS Studio has a Capture Cursor checkbox on its Display Capture and Window Capture sources. The Snipping Tool documents no such option. The other way is Focal, a screen recorder for Windows. It always records the screen without the cursor and keeps the cursor as data, so you decide after recording whether it appears at all, and what it looks like when it does.

My name is Vince. I make Focal, which means I have spent more evenings thinking about the mouse cursor than I would like to admit in public. The other recorders come first below, because one of them may be all you need. Mine comes after them, and you are welcome to stop reading before it.

Why record without the cursor

There are two reasons, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is a clean picture. A product shot on a landing page, a recording dropped into a slide, a short loop that plays at the top of a website: none of these need a pointer. A cursor parked in the middle of the frame looks like a mistake, and in a loop it jumps from wherever it ended back to wherever it started, every few seconds.

The second is a bad cursor. The real one is a faithful record of your hand: the small shake while you read, the overshoot past a button, the long hover over the thing you were explaining. Faithful is not the same as flattering. A recording made on a large monitor and watched on a phone also shrinks the standard cursor to a few pixels. Once a recorder has drawn that cursor into the video, it is part of every frame, and short of recording again there is no way to calm it down.

When to keep the cursor

If the video teaches something, the viewer is following the pointer. Take it away and menus open by themselves, buttons light up for no visible reason, and the tutorial turns into a short film about a haunted laptop. For tutorials and walkthroughs, keep the cursor and make it calm rather than removing it. That is where a cursor recorded as data pays off most.

How to hide the cursor in Xbox Game Bar

The settings for Game Bar and OBS Studio below were checked on the vendors’ own help pages on 2026-11-02.

Xbox Game Bar keeps its cursor option in Windows Settings:

1. Press the Start button and open Settings.
2. Go to Gaming, then Captures.
3. Turn off the option to capture the mouse cursor when recording a game.

Microsoft describes it on the Xbox Support page for capture settings in exactly those terms, as a choice about recording a game. Game Bar is built around games. If what you are recording is a spreadsheet rather than a boss fight, it is worth knowing what it can and cannot do, which I covered in Focal vs the recorders built into Windows.

How to hide the cursor in OBS Studio

In OBS Studio the cursor is a property of each capture source, and it is on by default.

1. In the Sources dock at the bottom of the main window, click + and add a Display Capture source for a whole monitor or a Window Capture source for one window.
2. Right-click the source and open its properties.
3. Untick Capture Cursor.

If a scene has more than one capture source, each one has its own checkbox, so check them all. The cursor always turns up in the one you skipped. The OBS Knowledge Base lists the property with the other settings of each source. OBS does far more than record, live streaming among it, and if you are choosing between it and Focal for demo videos, I compared the two in Focal vs OBS Studio.

What about the Snipping Tool

Microsoft’s help page for the Snipping Tool explains how to record: select Record, then New, or press Windows + Shift + R, choose an area, then Start and later Stop. It mentions no setting for the cursor, so there is no documented way to leave it out, and I would rather not send you on a hunt for an undocumented one. If the cursor has to go, use Game Bar, OBS Studio or Focal.

The catch: you choose before you record

With Game Bar and OBS Studio, the cursor is decided before the recording starts, and the decision holds for that file. Record with it off and there is no cursor in the video to bring back later. A tutorial recorded clean stays a tutorial with no pointer. Record with it on and the cursor is drawn into every frame, at the size Windows drew it, with every wobble your hand made. Zoom into that recording in an editor and the cursor is enlarged with the pixels around it, softer the closer you go.

That also means one take cannot serve two uses. The loop for the website wants no cursor and the tutorial wants a clear one, so you record twice, and the second take is never quite the same as the first. It is also, reliably, the one where a notification slides in halfway through.

How Focal records the cursor as data

Focal records the screen without the cursor in it, every time. While you record, it logs the cursor’s position, every click and the cursor’s shape, a thousand times a second, on the same clock as the video. The picture and the cursor stay apart until you export, which is why the cursor can be whatever you choose afterwards. For the longer version of the reasons, I wrote about why Focal records your screen without the cursor.

In the editor, the cursor is a setting rather than a fact of the recording:

• Hide it, for a clean recording with no pointer at all.
• Show the standard cursors drawn as vectors, light or dark, sharp at any zoom, or use the captured cursor, or an image of your own.
• Set its size, from small to large, so it still reads on a phone.
• Let the raw mouse path become a steady glide, so the shake and the overshoot are gone.
• Add a ripple on each click, a ring, a dot or a pulse, with an optional click sound.
• Put a halo or a spotlight around it that follows it.
• Let it fade when idle and come back when you move, so a pause does not leave a pointer parked on screen.

Fast cursor moves also get motion blur, on by default, with its amount in the Zoom tab, and any zoom can follow the cursor instead of holding on one point. The home page shows the cursor options in motion.

When you want a clean recording, you get the same one Game Bar or OBS Studio would give you with the cursor off. When you want a cursor, you get a better one than the real thing, with steadier hands than anyone actually has.

How to export a recording without the cursor in Focal

1. Press Print Screen to start. If another program already uses that key, Focal uses Ctrl+PrtSc and tells you so.
2. Drag a region, click a window to snap to it, or press Enter for the whole screen. For a product shot of one app, a window recording can leave out the app’s own title bar, or in Chrome, Edge and other Chromium browsers, everything but the page.
3. After the countdown, work as you normally would. Move the mouse wherever you need to. None of it lands in the picture. Stop from the control bar.
4. The editor opens with zooms already made from your clicks and typing. For a still shot or a loop, turn them off with the switch for automatic zooms in the Zoom tab, or keep the ones you like.
5. Hide the cursor in the editor’s cursor settings. The preview is drawn by the same renderer as the export, so it shows what the file will look like.
6. Export as MP4 up to 4K at 60 fps, or as a GIF for a README or a page that loops it. The guide to making a GIF of your screen covers that format.

If every recording should start without a cursor, save these settings as a style and set it as the default for new recordings. A style holds the cursor along with the background, padding, zoom feel and the rest of the look. You set it once and never think about it again, which is the best relationship anyone can have with a setting.

Focal is free to record and edit with every feature, with no time limit, no card and no account, from the download page. Exporting needs a license, and until you enter a key the editor’s preview shows a “Made with Focal” watermark, so you can judge the cursor-free result in the preview and export the final version once you have a key.

One recording, two videos

Because the cursor is never in the picture, one take can become both videos. Export it with the cursor hidden for the landing page, then use Save a copy, turn the cursor back on in the copy with a large size, a glide and a ripple on each click, and export the walkthrough. You only have to get the demo right once, and once is hard enough. If that walkthrough is a product demo, how to record a product demo video on Windows picks up from there.