How to Highlight Cursor with Yellow Circle on Windows 10 & 11

For things like presentations and screen recordings, the ability to highlight your mouse pointer is pretty helpful. It will help people follow the mouse pointer’s movement and clicks. In this tutorial, we’ll show a few methods to highlight the mouse cursor with a yellow circle background, though you can choose any color you want. Let’s get started.

Note: The below steps are tested to work on Windows 10 & 11.

Highlighting Your Cursor with a Yellow Circle

Both on Windows 10 & 11, there is no built-in option. So, we must use software to achieve the mouse cursor highlight effect. The good thing is that all the software shown in this article are free. So, find the one suitable for you and use it.

1. Using PenAttention

1. Download PenAttention.
2. Install the application by double-clicking on the exe file.
3. After installing open it from the Start menu.
4. Next, right-click on the PenAttention icon in the taskbar and select Highlight settings.
   
5. Here, select the Highlight mouse as well as pen option.
   
6. To change the color to yellow, click on the Color box, and select the yellow color.
   
7. Click on the “Apply changes” button.
   

From now, on the application will highlight the cursor with a yellow circle.

Troubleshooting: Issues with display scaling:

The application works perfectly fine for the most part. However, if your screen’s display scaling is anything other than 100%, the highlight might detach from the mouse cursor.

To fix that, open the application’s settings by right-clicking on the PenAttention icon on the taskbar and selecting the Highlight Settings option. Next, click on the Auto-detect button next to the Display scaling factor option. This will force the application to recalibrate the mouse cursor highlight according to your current display scaling settings.

You can also make the highlight circle big or small using the Circle slider.

2. Using PointerFocus

PointerFocus is another alternative that can add a yellow circle to the cursor. If you are facing problems with PenAttention, use this.

1. Download PointerFocus.
2. Install the downloaded application.
3. After installing, open the Start menu, search for PointerFocus, and click on the top result to open it.
4. As soon as you open, you will see a yellow ring around your mouse pointer.
   

Customizing Mouse Cursor Highlight Size & Color

If you don’t like how the default highlight looks, you can change it to a filled circle and reduce its size. Here’s how.

1. Right-click on the PointerFocust icon on the taskbar and select Options.
   
2. Go to the Highlight cursor tab.
3. Here, set the Size value to 50 and the Circle Width value to 30.
   
4. Click OK to save changes.

Once the changes are applied, you should see a yellow circle highlighted around the cursor.

To change the highlight color, click on the color box next to the Color option and choose the color your choice.

You can quickly enable or disable the cursor highlight by right-clicking on the taskbar icon and selecting the Highlight cursor option or by pressing the F8 key on the keyboard.

Note: PointerFocus is free for home and non-commercial users. The only limitation is that it will show the upgrade prompt every five minutes.

3. Using PowerToys

Sometimes, you just want to highlight the mouse pointer on click. In that case, you can use PowerToys, an official app from Microsoft that has a lot of useful tools built into it.

1. Download PowerToys.
2. Install PowerToys by double-clicking on the downloaded exe file.
3. After installing, open PowerToys by searching for it in the Start menu.
4. Select Mouse Utilities on the sidebar of the PowerToys window.
5. Scroll down and turn on the Enable Mouse Highlight toggle.

That’s it. Whenever you want to highlight the cursor, simply press the Windows key + Shift + H. By pressing the same shortcut again, the highlight will turn off.

You can customize the color and duration of the highlight by clicking on the Appearance & Behavior option on the Mouse Utilities page.

4. Install Mouse Cursor with Yellow Circle

If you don’t want to install and use additional software, you can also install a mouse cursor scheme that already has a highlight around it.

1. Download the Yellow Circle Cursor.
2. Open the Start menu, search for Mouse settings, and open it.
3. On the right page, scroll down and click on the Additional Mouse Settings link.
4. Go to the Pointers tab.
5. Here, select the Normal Select option and click on the Browse button.
   
6. Find the downloaded cursor, select it, and click Open.
   
7. This will add the cursor to the pointers. Click the Save as button.
   
8. Name the cursor scheme anything you want and click OK.
   
9. Ensure the new cursor scheme is selected and click OK.
   

That is it. As soon as you do that, Windows will enable the new mouse cursor. You can see it in action right away.

To revert to the default mouse cursor, open the Pointer options, select Windows Default (system scheme) from the drop-down menu, and save the changes.

And there you have it. It’s that simple to get a yellow circle around the mouse cursor. If you like this article, check out how to change the mouse cursor color and size in Windows and highlight the cursor on key press.