PGari Glowee: Mac brightness with window spotlight

Highlight the active window on a Mac, and leave the pointer alone

Short answer: The starting point for how to highlight the active window on a Mac is the signal macOS already gives you — the active app's name is set in bold in the menu bar, and Apple's user guide records that only one app holds that position at a time. Go past that and Apple's pages on app windows, on Desktop & Dock and on Accessibility display settings document no setting that dims or outlines whatever sits behind the front window. Apps fill that gap. PGari Glowee's Spotlight lowers everything except the window you are in, on every Mac display, thrown and cleared at ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S. Where an XDR panel is fitted, Glowee can push that single window brighter than the screen around it as well. Note the boundary carefully: a window is what gets lit. The mouse pointer is not marked, clicks are not shown, nothing is drawn on the screen — the pointer section further down names the tools that do those things.

Glowee's Spotlight used to highlight the active window on a Mac: the window stays at normal brightness while the rest of the screen is dimmed

Window or pointer: settle which one should stand out

The word "highlighter" carries at least two meanings into this search, and the tools behind them barely intersect.

What should stand out	What does it
The window you are working in	PGari Glowee (Spotlight, Boost Area), HazeOver, Tinkle
The mouse pointer	macOS pointer settings; Presentify; Mouseposé
Mouse clicks	macOS Screenshot options (Shift-Command-5); Presentify; Mouseposé
Keystrokes	Mouseposé
Drawing and annotation on the screen	Presentify

What macOS marks by itself

Apple's user guide sets out the basic cue: one app is active at any moment, and its name in bold, together with its menus, occupies the menu bar. Beyond that cue, macOS is better at helping you locate a window than at marking one out.

Mission Control. Control-Up Arrow. Every open window is laid out in a single layer "so it's easy to spot the one you need", and Control-Down Arrow narrows that to the front app's windows.
Cycle inside an app. Command-`, using the grave accent key, moves to the next open window of the front app; add Shift and it runs the other way.
Increase contrast. System Settings → Accessibility → Display. This lifts the contrast of items such as borders around buttons or boxes. Alongside it, Show window title icons places each window's icon in its title bar, which Apple says "can make it easier to distinguish among windows or tabs when you have several open".
Stage Manager. System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Desktop & Stage Manager, which holds the app in use front and centre.
Hide the others. Option-Command-H keeps the front app and puts every other app away.

Locating, arranging and hiding are what those Apple pages describe. Dimming or outlining the windows behind the active one appears on none of them, and that absence is exactly the space window highlighters occupy.

Three ways an app can highlight the active window on a Mac

Lower everything else. Your window is left alone while the surroundings drop. HazeOver defines itself in precisely those terms: it "automatically highlights the front window by dimming background windows". Glowee's Spotlight runs on the same principle, dimming everything except the window you are in.

Flash something when focus moves. Tinkle is "a macOS app that appends a visual effect at the focused window changes", and reckons it "helps you if you often lose sight of the focused window especially the window is switched by keyboard shortcuts". The effect fires at the moment of the switch.

Raise the window itself. An XDR or EDR display is a condition of this one, and Boost Area is the setting behind it. Put Boost Area on Active Window and the extra brightness lands on your current window alone, with the desktop and every other window left precisely as they were. Run Spotlight alongside it and the lit window climbs while the rest drops back.

No border and no outline is drawn around anything. If an outline is what you are after, look elsewhere.

Working the feature: highlight the active window on a Mac in four steps

Glowee is a sun in the menu bar, and one menu holds everything.

Click the sun. Under Spotlight, take Soft or Strong, according to how cluttered the screen is.
After that, ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S throws and clears Spotlight from any app, returning at the level you last used.
On an XDR or EDR display, take Low, Medium or Max under Extra Brightness, and put Boost Area on Active Window so the light lands on the window you are in.
To shut the whole app down and bring it back, the chord is ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ G.

Click into another window and the light goes with it. Under Active Window the lit window is the front window of whichever app you are using; under Pinned it stays the window that was in front when you chose the setting, until you choose differently, and anything dragged across it is left unlit.

Feature	What it does to the window	Displays
Spotlight: Off, Soft, Strong	Dims everything except the window you are in	Any Mac display, built in or external
Boost Area: Active Window	Raises the brightness of the window you are in; the light moves when you click another window	XDR and EDR displays only
Boost Area: Pinned	Keeps the extra brightness on one window while you click around; windows dragged across it stay unlit	XDR and EDR displays only

Those brightness levels scale the display's gamma table by 1.20×, 1.38× and 1.50× at Low, Medium and Max, inside whatever headroom the panel has free. Nothing can boost a MacBook Air, or any other display built without an XDR panel — Spotlight, being plain dimming, carries on unaffected. Driving a display harder draws more power and makes more heat, as pushing the built-in slider up does. There is more in the MacBook Pro brightness guide.

It survives into recordings and shared screens

Spotlight is painted onto the screen, so screenshots and screen recordings pick it up as they would any window, and there is no masking to do later in the edit. Anyone watching your demo, your class or your walkthrough can see which window you mean without being told. Extra Brightness runs the opposite way: captures leave it out entirely, so footage shot on a boosted panel plays back looking perfectly ordinary. Spotlight for screen recordings goes further into it.

While sharing a screen, macOS can also hold the notifications back: System Settings → Notifications → Show Notifications: when mirroring or sharing the display. Apple's own illustration is pausing them during a presentation.

If it was the mouse pointer you wanted marked

That is not a job for Glowee. No ring is drawn around the pointer, no clicks or keystrokes are shown, and there are no drawing tools. These handle it:

macOS pointer settings, under System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Pointer. Set the pointer's size, its outline and fill colours, and switch on Shake mouse pointer to locate, which enlarges the pointer when you move it quickly.
macOS Screenshot. Shift-Command-5, then Options, where showing the mouse pointer or the clicks is offered. Apple points out that the options on offer are not the same for screenshots as for screen recordings.
Presentify presents itself as a way to "annotate your screen, highlight your cursor, and spotlight or zoom in on key areas", drawing a ring, squircle or rhombus around the cursor.
Mouseposé states that on activation "it dims the screen and shines a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer", and it makes keystrokes visible and highlights mouse clicks besides.

Every description there comes from that maker's own site.

Common questions about marking out a window on a Mac

App that highlights what Window is in focus?

Several exist. HazeOver and Glowee's Spotlight both work by dimming the background windows; Tinkle fires a visual effect as the focused window changes; and on an XDR display Glowee can lift the focused window above the rest of the screen.

Do you prefer a border outline or background dimming?

Glowee only does the dimming, plus the brightening on XDR panels. No border is ever drawn. Because the dimming is on-screen, recordings and shared screens carry it to your audience as well.

How to highlight pointer on Mac?

Not through Glowee. Reach for System Settings → Accessibility → Display → Pointer to change size and colour, or an app of the Presentify or Mouseposé sort for a ring or a spotlight following the pointer.

How to see all active windows on Mac?

Control-Up Arrow brings up Mission Control; Control-Down Arrow narrows it to the front app's own windows.

What does Spotlight do on a Mac?

Two entirely separate things answer to the name. Apple's Spotlight is the Mac's search, opened at Command-Space bar — Apple's screenshot instructions even suggest using it to launch the Screenshot app. Glowee's Spotlight is a dimming feature that happens to share the word, and its chord is ⌃ ⌥ ⌘ S.

Are you using a single or multi-monitor setup?

Either is fine for Spotlight, which runs on any display, built in or external. The extra brightness wants EDR-capable panels, and every connected one is lifted at the same moment.

Can I try it first?

Yes. Seven days, every feature open, no account and no card. After that it is a one-time purchase — one Mac, or three Macs on one key, with a 30-day refund.

Try it on your own screen

PGari Glowee is a single menu bar app under 2 MB, built for macOS 13 or later and universal across Apple silicon and Intel. No kernel extension is installed and no background helper is left running; quit the app and the display goes straight back to normal. Related reading: turning the inactive windows down and holding your focus on one window.

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