Invisible teleprompter on Mac: keep notes off the shared screen

The share that showed your notes

You are midway through a Zoom review. Your private notes are feeding you the numbers you need. Someone asks for the dashboard, you share your screen, and the overlay is right there in the share. Or you finish a Loom, hit play, and watch the same text floating over the demo for the whole recording. So you re-record, or you stop using notes on shared calls.

That is not a Zoom bug. Any notes window that is a normal visible macOS window can enter the capture pipeline used by screen sharing and recording, unless the app excludes it.

CueNotch Ghost Mode is built for that miss. On macOS 12 and later, setting a window's sharingType to .none removes it from the screen-capture pipeline. You still see the overlay on your display; Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Loom, OBS, QuickTime and other apps using standard macOS capture APIs do not get it in the frame. It is first-party capture exclusion, not an opacity trick and not a move-it-off-screen workaround.

If you searched for an invisible teleprompter on Mac because a share or a recording leaked your notes, this is the mechanism. The self-test is QuickTime: activate CueNotch with Cmd+Shift+Space, record a few seconds, play it back. Your desktop is there. CueNotch is not. For live calls, pair this with the Zoom workflow or the guide to speaker notes while screen sharing on Zoom.

• $29.99 lifetime, or $7.99 per week
• Free: 3 activations a day, 100-word scripts
• Ghost Mode is a Pro feature
• 3-day Pro trial does not auto-renew

How Ghost Mode actually works

CueNotch takes a different approach. Instead of trying to hide a standard window from capture after the fact, Ghost Mode tells macOS to exclude the window from screen capture at the system level.

Since macOS 12 (Monterey), Apple provides a window property called sharingType. When a window's sharing type is set to .none, macOS removes it from the screen capture pipeline entirely. The window is still rendered on your physical display, but the operating system will not include it in any capture buffer. It's the same mechanism macOS uses for its own private UI elements: the ones you can see on screen but never appear in screenshots.

This is not a hack or a workaround. It's a first-party Apple API designed for exactly this purpose. The window is genuinely invisible to capture, not obscured, not moved, not made transparent. It simply does not exist in the captured output.

What arrives at the other end is the capture buffer. A window whose sharing type is none was never written into it.

Apps Ghost Mode is invisible to

Because Ghost Mode operates at the macOS system level, it works with every application that uses the standard screen capture APIs. Here is a confirmed list:

• Zoom: invisible during full screen share and individual window share
• Google Meet: invisible across all sharing modes (tab, window, entire screen)
• Microsoft Teams: invisible during screen sharing and presentation mode
• Loom: does not appear in screen recordings, regardless of capture settings
• OBS Studio: excluded from both display capture and window capture sources
• QuickTime Player: does not appear in screen recordings
• Any app using macOS screen capture APIs: if it uses CGWindowListCreateImage, ScreenCaptureKit, or the legacy AVCaptureScreenInput, Ghost Mode works

How to test Ghost Mode yourself

You don't have to take our word for it. You can verify Ghost Mode in under two minutes with nothing more than QuickTime Player, which is already on your Mac.

1. Open CueNotch

   Paste any text into the script editor. A few sentences is enough.

2. Activate the teleprompter

   Press Cmd+Shift+Space. You should see your script scrolling in the notch area of your MacBook.

3. Open QuickTime Player

   Go to File → New Screen Recording, then click Record.

4. Wait a few seconds

   Keep CueNotch clearly visible on your screen, then stop the recording.

5. Play back the recording

   Your desktop, browser, and every other app will appear in the recording. CueNotch will not. The area where the teleprompter was is simply not there.

For a live test, start a Zoom call with a friend or colleague, share your screen, and ask them to confirm they cannot see the teleprompter. They won't.

Free alternatives and their tradeoffs

Free notch teleprompter apps for Mac vary in capture privacy, distribution, support, and preparation features. Check each app's current documentation and test it with your own sharing and recording workflow before relying on it in a live call.

• NotchPrompter: its official site describes it as free and open source and advertises voice activation and screen-capture privacy. Verify those features with the current release and your own conferencing or recording setup.
• NotchPrompt: review its current public documentation and test capture behavior before using it with private notes.
• Textream: compare its current public feature information and verify capture behavior in the sharing or recording tools you use.

Free open-source options can cover capable prompting workflows. The practical differences are capture behavior, distribution, support, and the preparation tools included with each app. CueNotch combines Ghost Mode with Magic Polish, Rehearsal Coach, AutoCaption, Memorize Mode, a script library, a free tier, and weekly or lifetime Pro access.

Ghost Mode availability

Ghost Mode is included in CueNotch Pro, available as a $7.99 auto-renewing weekly subscription or $29.99 lifetime purchase in the U.S. App Store. Local App Store pricing may vary. Both plans unlock the same Pro features.

Every new user gets a 3-day free trial of all Pro features, including Ghost Mode. No credit card is required to start the trial. If you decide not to upgrade after the trial, CueNotch continues to work as a free teleprompter. You just lose access to Ghost Mode and other Pro features. For hands-free delivery, see how voice-synced teleprompter scrolling works. If you're evaluating your options, check out the best free teleprompter apps for Mac or our CueNotch vs Moody comparison.