Smooth Cursor

Native macOS screen recording with auto zoom, a buttery cursor and 3D phone mockups

Record your screen, an app window or an iPhone. Smooth Cursor turns the raw capture into a polished, ready-to-post video with no editing skills needed.

_{The editor: live Metal preview, inspector and timeline}

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Overview

Smooth Cursor is a native macOS screen recorder built around presentation quality. It records your screen with the cursor hidden and logs every movement, click and keystroke at 120 Hz. Then it re-renders the cursor smoothly, zooms in where the action happens and frames the video on a background, or inside a 3D iPhone.

Everything happens on your Mac. The preview and the export use the same GPU renderer, so what you see is exactly what you get.

Built for:

• Product demos and launch videos
• App Store and social media previews
• Coding walkthroughs and tutorials
• Bug reports and UI showcases

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Features

Capture	Editing	Export
Display, window or area recording iPhone over USB and iOS Simulator System audio and microphone tracks Webcam overlay that adapts to vertical videos 120 Hz cursor, click and key telemetry Countdown, pause, global hotkeys Video import	Auto zoom from clicks and typing Spring-smoothed cursor, custom cursors Zoom, camera, blur and audio tracks Trim, split and remove idle parts Markers that become chapters Smart crop that follows the action in vertical formats Backgrounds, padding, corners, shadow 3D iPhone with camera shots Captions, keystrokes, blur regions Presets, full undo and full screen preview	H.264, HEVC, ProRes and GIF Up to 4K at 60 fps Presets for YouTube, X, Reels and more Camera and cursor motion blur Mixed audio with click sounds Hardware encoding, faster than real time Background export queue

Requires: macOS 26 or later

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Quick Start

Run with Xcode

The project is generated with XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open SmoothCursor.xcodeproj

Then press ⌘R.

Build from the command line

xcodegen generate && xcodebuild -project SmoothCursor.xcodeproj -scheme SmoothCursor -derivedDataPath build/DerivedData build

Permissions

On first launch, Smooth Cursor asks for:

• Screen Recording, to capture the screen
• Accessibility, to record keystrokes (optional)
• Microphone and Camera, for narration and the webcam overlay (optional)

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Keyboard shortcuts

Shortcut	Action
⌥⇧⌘R	Start or stop recording
⌥⇧⌘P	Pause or resume recording
Space	Play / pause
← / →	Previous / next frame
Z	Add a zoom (or a camera shot on the 3D phone)
B	Draw a blur region
T	Add text
M	Add a marker (markers become chapters)
N	Toggle snapping (hold ⌥ to bypass)
F	Full screen preview
Esc	Deselect, or leave full screen
S	Split the clip at the playhead
⌫	Delete the selection
⌘E	Export (from the Export panel)

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Project structure

App/Sources            SwiftUI app: home, recorder, editor, design system
Packages/SmoothKit
  SCCore               Project model, cursor and camera motion, auto zoom, edits
  SCCapture            ScreenCaptureKit, iPhone capture, input telemetry, webcam
  SCRender             Metal compositor, 3D phone renderer, preview playback
  SCExport             Hardware export, audio mix, GIF, export queue
  SCProject            .smoothcursor packages, autosave, library, captions

Package tests:

cd Packages/SmoothKit && swift test

Developer tools: swift run sc-record, swift run sc-render and swift run sc-export record, render a frame and export a project from the command line.