The cursor overlay feature re-renders a stylized cursor on top of your exported video using position telemetry captured in real time during the recording. Because the overlay is drawn at export time rather than burned into the raw capture, you can change the cursor style, size, and smoothing settings without re-recording — and the cursor always tracks the real pointer path from your original session.Documentation Index
Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.openrecorder.xyz/llms.txt
Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
How cursor overlay works
While you record, Open Recorder samples the cursor position at up to 60 Hz and saves the data as a JSON telemetry file alongside the video (for example,recording.cursor.json). Each sample stores the cursor’s X and Y coordinates relative to the captured screen area, plus a millisecond timestamp.
At export time, Open Recorder reads the telemetry file and builds a frame-by-frame animation that drives the cursor glyph layer on top of every video frame during rendering. Open Recorder samples the cursor position at approximately 30 samples per output second when building this animation.
The cursor position is mapped from the recorded screen space into the output frame coordinate space, accounting for the crop rectangle and any active background padding.
Enabling cursor overlay
The cursor overlay toggle is in the Cursor tab of the Appearance inspector on the right side of the editor.Open the Cursor inspector tab
In the editor, click the cursor icon in the inspector rail to open the Cursor tab.
The cursor overlay option is only available when telemetry data was captured during the recording. If the telemetry file is missing or empty, the overlay has no position data and the option has no effect. See the note about Accessibility permission below.
Cursor style options
Open Recorder ships six cursor styles:| Style | Description |
|---|---|
| Arrow | White filled arrow — the standard macOS pointer shape |
| macOS Black | Dark filled arrow with a white stroke — matches the macOS “black” cursor accessibility option |
| Outline | Arrow drawn as an outline only, no fill |
| Hand | Pointing hand / link pointer shape |
| I-Beam | Text insertion cursor |
| Dot | Simple circle |
| Variant | Character |
|---|---|
| Standard | Default proportions |
| Slim | Thinner stroke and narrower shape |
| Soft | Slightly rounder, medium weight |
| Bold | Heavier stroke and wider shape |
- Loop Cursor — when enabled, the cursor animation loops back to the beginning after the telemetry ends, useful when the recording is shorter than the cursor track.
- Size — a multiplier from 1× to 8× that scales the cursor glyph relative to the default size derived from the output frame dimensions.
- Smoothing — a value from 0 to 2 that applies a weighted-average smoothing window to the cursor position samples, reducing jitter in the exported animation.
Cursor and zoom interaction
When a zoom region is active in the timeline, the cursor overlay position is scaled to match the zoom depth and focus point. During the zoom’s ramp-in and ramp-out, the cursor position interpolates in sync with the zoom animation so the cursor remains correctly placed over the zoomed content throughout the transition. This means you do not need to do anything special to make the cursor work correctly with zoom regions — the mapping is handled automatically at export time.Cursor telemetry is only available for recordings made with Accessibility permission granted to Open Recorder. Accessibility permission allows Open Recorder to observe the global mouse position and click events. Without it, the telemetry file is not created and the cursor overlay option is unavailable for that recording. You can grant Accessibility permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.