highlight-pointer
Highlight mouse pointer/cursor using a dot - useful for presentations, screen sharing, ...
Demo
Features
- Very lightweight, should work on any Linux/Unix system running an X server
- Should work with any software capturing/sharing the screen regardless if it shows the cursor (like Zoom) or not (like Skype)
- Set color for mouse button released and/or pressed state
- Highlight using a filled or outlined dot
- Auto-hide highlight and/or cursor after a time when not moving and re-show when moving again
- Global hotkeys for toggling cursor or highlighter and for toggling auto-hiding
Installation
Download the highlight-pointer binary from the releases
page
or see below to build yourself.
Prerequisites
To build highlight-pointer you need the X11, Xext, Xfixes, and Xi
libraries. On Debian/Ubuntu, just install these using
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev
Building
Just build the highlight-pointer binary using
make
Usage
Just call the highlight-pointer binary and include command line
options if you want to change color, size, etc. (see below).
To quit the program press Ctrl+C in the terminal where you started
it, or run killall highlight-pointer.
Options
Usage:
highlight-pointer [options]
-h, --help show this help message
DISPLAY OPTIONS
-c, --released-color COLOR dot color when mouse button released [default: #d62728]
-p, --pressed-color COLOR dot color when mouse button pressed [default: #1f77b4]
-o, --outline OUTLINE line width of outline or 0 for filled dot [default: 0]
-r, --radius RADIUS dot radius in pixels [default: 5]
--hide-highlight start with highlighter hidden
--show-cursor start with cursor shown
TIMEOUT OPTIONS
--auto-hide-cursor hide cursor when not moving after timeout
--auto-hide-highlight hide highlighter when not moving after timeout
-t, --hide-timeout TIMEOUT timeout for hiding when idle, in seconds [default: 3]
HOTKEY OPTIONS
--key-quit KEY quit
--key-toggle-cursor KEY toggle cursor visibility
--key-toggle-highlight KEY toggle highlight visibility
--key-toggle-auto-hide-cursor KEY toggle auto-hiding cursor when not moving
--key-toggle-auto-hide-highlight KEY toggle auto-hiding highlight when not moving
Hotkeys are global and can only be used if not set yet by a different process.
Keys can be given with modifiers
'S' (shift key), 'C' (ctrl key), 'M' (alt/meta key), 'H' (super/"windows" key)
delimited by a '-'.
Keys themselves are parsed by X, so chars like a...z can be set directly,
special keys are named as in /usr/include/X11/keysymdef.h
or see, e.g. http://xahlee.info/linux/linux_show_keycode_keysym.html
Examples: 'H-Left', 'C-S-a'