The PointerPop user guide

PointerPop lives in your menu bar (macOS) or system tray (Windows). There's no main window — the app draws a transparent, click-through overlay on every display, so effects and ink appear on top of whatever you're presenting without getting in the way of your mouse.

Click the tray icon for the menu: Draw on Screen, Save Screenshot, Clear Drawings, Whiteboard, Blackboard, Magnifier, Zoom Screen, Break Timer, Particle Burst, Highlight Ring, Spotlight, Click Flash, Preferences, and Quit. Most of these also have a global hotkey — see the hotkey table — and every hotkey is rebindable.

Preferences opens in its own window (the overlay keeps running) with five tabs: Particles, Emphasis, Drawing, Break, and System. The System tab includes a Paper / Ink toggle that restyles the whole app between the cream riso look and a deep-sea dark mode.

Firing it

Press ⌘⇧P (macOS) / Ctrl⇧P (Windows), or pick Particle Burst from the tray menu.

• Burst mode (default): each press fires one burst at the cursor — great for punctuating a point.
• Trail mode: the hotkey toggles a continuous particle trail that follows the cursor until you press it again. Switch modes in Preferences → Particles → Behavior.

Making it yours

The Particles tab has a live preview and cards for every knob:

• Shape — built-in shapes (stars are the default) or your own images. Double-click a custom image's chip to rename it.
• Color — Rainbow (full, warm, or cool palette), two-color, white, or a custom trio of your own colors. Save trios as named color profiles and switch between them — handy for matching a client's brand mid-demo.
• Motion — how many particles per burst (default 24), plus speed, size, and lifetime multipliers.
• Physics — gravity pull and the spread of each burst.
• Appearance — whether particles fade out, shrink, or both as they leave, and an overall opacity.

Custom particle images (and clean cutouts)

Import any image — your logo, a mascot, an emoji PNG — and it becomes a particle shape chip alongside the built-ins. If the image has no transparency of its own, an import preview offers background removal:

• Edge fill — one-click removal of the background color, with a checkerboard preview and an adjustable strength slider.
• Click to erase — tap any leftover patch to erase the color-connected region under the click, magic-wand style.
• Auto subject (macOS 14+ only) — one click runs Apple's on-device subject detection and lifts the person or object out of a photo. Not available on Windows; flat logos usually do better with the color modes anyway.
• Lasso touch-ups — drag a loop around any area to force it erased or restored, on top of either automatic mode. Undo and Reset cover taps and lassos together.

Images that already have transparency import unchanged. The same import flow applies to custom stamp images.

◯Highlight ring

A colored ring that follows your cursor everywhere. Adjustable size, opacity, and color. The simplest way to make a cursor findable on a big projector.

🔦Spotlight

Dims the whole screen except a circle around the cursor. Adjustable radius and dim strength — everything but your point of focus fades into the background.

💥Click flash

A ripple on every click, with separate colors for left and right clicks — perfect for recorded tutorials where viewers need to see when you clicked.

Magnifier loupe — ⌘⇧M / Ctrl⇧M

A circular lens around the cursor that magnifies whatever is under it (2× by default, adjustable 1.5–4×, with a resizable lens). Native on both macOS and Windows. Great for tiny UI, dense spreadsheets, and code.

On macOS the magnifier needs the Screen Recording permission — see Help.

Full-screen zoom

Zoom the entire screen toward your cursor, ZoomIt-style. It ships without a default hotkey — assign one in Preferences → Emphasis → Full-Screen Zoom, or use the tray's Zoom Screen item.

• Scroll or press + / − to adjust the zoom level (up to a configurable max, 3× by default).
• Move the mouse to pan — the view follows your cursor, with optional smoothing.
• Esc exits.
• You can draw while zoomed — enter drawing mode as usual and annotate the magnified view.

Platform difference: Windows zooms the live screen (apps keep updating while zoomed); macOS uses a freeze-frame zoom — it captures the screen and zooms into that still image, which also needs the Screen Recording permission.

The tools

Eight tools, each on a number key while drawing:

Shift-snapping updates live — press or release ⇧ mid-drag and the shape follows. Each tool remembers its own color and width.

Colors while drawing

One key per ink color: R red, O orange, Y yellow, G green, B blue, P purple, W white, K black. The toolbar also has a custom ink picker — any color you like, with your four most recent picks kept one click away.

Everything else on the keyboard

• ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z — undo (action-based: undoes the last stroke, stamp, text, or clear).
• ⌘⌫ / Ctrl+Backspace — clear everything on this display.
• C — screenshot the current display; S — drag-select an area to snip.
• Esc — exit drawing mode. By default this also clears your ink (turn off "Clear drawings on exit" in Preferences → Drawing to keep it).

All of these single keys are customizable in Preferences → Drawing → Keys While Drawing: click a chip, press a key.

The floating toolbar

Tools, colors, width, stamp picker, screenshot and snip buttons, whiteboard/blackboard toggles, and quick switches for auto-fade and auto-exit — with hover captions that show each button's key. Choose where it lives in Preferences → Drawing: on every display, on one display (e.g. your private screen while the other is shared), or hidden for keyboard-only drawing.

Ink that cleans up after itself

• Auto-fade (off by default): drawings fade away a few seconds after you finish them (default 4s, 1–30s) so you can keep talking without stopping to erase.
• Auto-exit (on by default): drawing mode ends by itself after 8 seconds without a stroke (3–60s), handing the mouse back to you.
• Hold-to-draw (optional): instead of toggling, hold the hotkey down to draw and release to stop.
• Clear everywhere: ⌘⇧X / Ctrl⇧X wipes annotations on every display at once — it works even outside drawing mode.

Whiteboard & blackboard

⌘⇧W / Ctrl⇧W covers the cursor's display with a whiteboard; ⌘⇧K / Ctrl⇧K gives you a blackboard. Draw on them with the full toolset. Board sketches are exempt from auto-fade by default — like a real whiteboard, they stay up until you clear them (there's a toggle if you want fading there too).

Captures include your annotations and boards — what your audience sees is what you save.

• Full display: ⌘⇧6 / Ctrl⇧6 anytime, C while drawing, or the tray / toolbar buttons. Captures the display the cursor is on.
• Area snip: press S while drawing (or the toolbar's snip button), then drag a rectangle. Esc cancels.
• Clipboard: every shot is copied to the clipboard by default — paste straight into chat or email. Toggle in Preferences → Break → Screenshots.
• Folder: shots also save as timestamped PNGs to Pictures/PointerPop, or any folder you choose.
• Reveal after save (off by default): pops the file in Finder / Explorer — left off so a window never appears on a shared screen mid-presentation.

A confirmation toast appears on every display so you know it worked. On macOS, screenshots use the Screen Recording permission (Help).

Show the keys you press as on-screen badges — ⌘⇧A on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+A style on Windows, with repeat counts and modifier taps. Great for teaching shortcuts.

• Off by default, deliberately — everything you type would appear on a shared screen, so you opt in. On macOS, secure (password) fields are never reported to PointerPop, so those stay hidden even while it's on. On Windows, turn it off before typing anything sensitive.
• Configure the corner (bottom-center by default), size, and which display shows the badges in Preferences → Break → Keystroke Display.
• Assign a global toggle hotkey so you can flip it on and off mid-presentation (unassigned by default).
• On macOS this feature needs the Accessibility permission — the app walks you through granting it the first time.

Break timer — ⌘⇧T / Ctrl⇧T

A full-screen countdown on every display your audience can actually read. Default 5 minutes (1–60), color of your choice, set in Preferences → Break. Toggle it with the hotkey or the tray; Esc dismisses it early.

Share-mode reminder

When you use an effect while a conferencing app (Zoom, Teams, Webex) is running, PointerPop shows a one-time-per-session reminder to share your entire screen — because single-window shares can't include overlays. Turn it off in Preferences → System if you know the drill.

Every display, really

Each monitor gets its own overlay on both OSes — including Windows extended desktops with mixed DPI scaling (say, a 125% laptop next to a 150% 4K monitor). Effects follow the cursor across displays; drawings are per-display; the break timer covers all of them. See multi-monitor notes in Help.

The System tab

• Appearance — Paper (cream riso) or Ink (deep-sea dark); restyles the whole app live.
• General — the share reminder toggle, launch at login, and the particle hotkey.
• Backup — export everything (hotkeys, color profiles, custom particle and stamp images, all preferences) to a single .pointerpop-backup file, and import it on any other computer — including across macOS and Windows. Importing writes a safety copy of your current settings first, so you can always go back.
• About — version info, links, a Check for updates button, and an optional check-at-launch toggle (off by default; the app makes no network calls unless you ask — see the privacy policy).
• Reset — Reset Shortcuts restores every key binding; Reset to Defaults restores all settings but keeps your custom images, color profiles, and screenshot folder.

Settings are stored locally on your machine and never uploaded. For where exactly, and how to move them between computers, see Help.