Need two mouse pointers on Windows 10 & 11

Question

Update: We are having this need now also for Windows 11

You know this concept from your car driving lessons: You have your steering wheel and your pedals and mirrors and the instructor has got his own set (in most countries minus the steering wheel).

In our small-group training sessions, our students take turns and apply what they have learnt in front of the class: one set of screens to work, three more screens to follow along.

We need large mouse pointers with different colours for training: One for the trainee that is active, and a pointing-only mouse-pointer for the trainer. (Optionally the trainer could actively use his/her mouse and also click stuff, but the pointer should in this case change colour or give a visual feedback.)

So far we are already using two mice, and Windows can handle that just fine. But it is often confusing to the class, to follow who is doing what.

For those who love context: This is for complex and full screens, like when we train for desktop publishing with not-trivial documents. It takes a lot of time, for the teacher to orally explain what tool to grab and where to find certain hidden options. So pointing is more efficient than telling.

We do not limit our search to free or open source tools, we could spend some money for such a tool, because we only need very few licences. If there were a similar tool for Linux, especially OpenSuse, we would also love to hear about it, but that is optional too.

Answer 1

Warning: read the full text before downloading.

IMHO, Eithermouse is what you need.

• It shows multiple cursors (one per mouse)
• It is free (donation ware)
• It's open source (source code provided, but no FOSS license)
• It works on Windows
• You can mirror the mouse cursor to better distinguish the teacher cursor from the student cursor

Disadvantages:

• When both participants move the mouse simultaneously, I noticed some flickering.

• The mouse that has a mirrored cursor may become invisible when being moved over a text field.

• The application may be detected as a trojan/virus by quite a few virus scanners. I can't fully judge about this, especially not when it comes to the binary file that is provided for download. However, the author also provides the source code (download the ZIP file).

  I have not read the complete 2500 lines of code, but it's quite likely that the identification as a trojan or dropper comes from this part of the code:

  

  It is there for downloading updates of the software.

  If you use this in a company, talk to your IT department before downloading and using.

Answer 2

Setting up a new computer (again, for teamwork and training) I came back here.

Today I discovered this website with a good overview: 7 Free Tools to Control More Than One Mouse on One Computer

And I ended up installing - and liking - MouseMux from here MouseMux website

I am not claiming yet that it is the best solution to our needs, but it is working and I got no security issues as far as I can tell. And nothing has flickered nor crashed during my first tests today. Machine is now Windows 11 Pro.