What is a Follow-Cursor Highlight?

A follow-cursor highlight is a highlight whose defining behavior is that it tracks the pointer continuously. Rather than appearing only on clicks or fading after movement, it remains attached to the cursor and travels with every motion. This continuous tracking is what makes it dependable for guiding an audience: the marker is always exactly where the pointer is.

The term emphasizes the follow behavior to distinguish it from event-based effects. Click highlighting appears only when a button is pressed, and a mouse trail lags behind the pointer as a fading streak. A follow-cursor highlight does neither; it sits on the live pointer position. It is essentially the same idea as a cursor spotlight, just named to stress that it follows the cursor in real time.

Follow-cursor highlights are ideal for demos, lectures, and recordings where the pointer must stay findable throughout. Limelight implements exactly this with its cursor spotlight, a soft glow that follows your pointer and toggles on with ⌃⌥1. As a macOS menu-bar app it keeps the highlight locked to your cursor over any app, and it records your screen itself — baking the highlight into a finished, cinematic video.