01 Free macOS app
A cursor ring your audience never sees.
Wisp glows a soft marker around your pointer on every display — and hides it from screenshots, screen recordings, and screen sharing. Your audience gets a clean screen. You always know where your cursor is.
Requirements
macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon & Intel · No Accessibility, no Screen Recording, no prompts
Clear quarantine
First launch
Wisp is ad-hoc signed and not notarized. In Applications, right-click Wisp → Open → Open. You only do this once. MIT licensed.
02 Demo
The same second, twice.
Left is your display. Right is what lands in the recording, the screenshot, and the shared window. Nothing else changes — the ring simply isn’t there.
03 How it works
One window, one flag.
No compositing tricks, no capture filters, no daemon. A single window property does the whole job — which is why it holds up on every capture path macOS has.
One property
The ring lives in a borderless, transparent overlay window set to sharingType = .none. macOS then leaves it out of CGWindowList captures, ScreenCaptureKit, the system screenshot UI, and screen sharing.
Click-through
The overlay never intercepts a mouse event. You keep clicking, dragging, and scrolling exactly as if it weren’t there — because as far as every other app is concerned, it isn’t.
Every display, every Space
One window spans the union of your screens and follows you across Spaces, including over full-screen apps. Plug in a projector and the ring is already there.
No permission prompt
Pointer tracking uses a global mouse-move monitor, which macOS does not gate behind Accessibility, and the hotkeys use Carbon. Out of the box, Wisp asks for nothing.
04 Features
A pointer with a presence.
Everything is a toggle in the menu bar or a slider in Settings, and every change applies live.
Four marker styles
Ring, double ring, dot, or crosshair — whichever reads best on your material
Highlight on click
An expanding pulse flashes from the marker on mouse down, so clicks land visibly
Spotlight
Dims the whole desktop but a soft circle around the pointer — ⌥⌘S, radius and falloff adjustable
Cursor trail
Fading ghosts follow a fast flick across the screen, so the eye can catch up
Fade when idle
The marker dims away during a quiet spell and returns the instant you move
Global hotkeys
Rebindable shortcuts for ring and spotlight; the recorder refuses one another app owns
Menu bar, no Dock icon
Toggle everything from the bar, and launch at login via SMAppService
Settings that stick
Five panes, five color presets plus a custom picker, stored as JSON that loads forward
05 Detail
Hidden for you, visible for them.
The ring is a tool for you, so it is hidden from capture. The optional keystroke HUD is a tool for your audience, so it defaults to the opposite — it shows up in the recording on purpose. One switch flips it back to display-only if you’d rather keep it to yourself.
Keystroke display is the one feature that needs Accessibility, because reading keys pressed in other apps is exactly what macOS gates. It ships off: no monitor is registered and no prompt appears until you turn it on in Settings › Keyboard, and turning it back off tears the monitor down.
Wisp (n.) — a will-o’-the-wisp, a ghostly marsh light only you can follow.
06 Install
Ready before your next call.
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01
Download & drag
Grab the DMG from the latest release, open it, and drag Wisp onto the Applications folder sitting beside it. A zip of the same app is attached to every release too.
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02
Open it once the long way
Wisp is ad-hoc signed and not notarized, so macOS holds it at the door. Right-click Wisp → Open → Open, or clear the quarantine flag from Terminal. Once, and never again.
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03
Point at something
Wisp lives in the menu bar — no Dock icon. The ring is on immediately; ⌥⌘S drops the spotlight. Nothing to grant, nothing to configure before your next call.
Free & MIT licensed · wisp.shafer.llc · Source on GitHub
07 Next step
Need something built the same way?
Small, native, permission-free, and shipped. Tell us what you’re making and we’ll come back with an approach and a timeline.