How to hide notes during screen sharing on a Mac

You want your talking points in front of you and invisible to everyone else. There are three ways to do it, and they are not equally good.

1. Share a window, not your whole screen

Every conferencing app lets you share a single window instead of the entire display. When you do, the stream only ever contains that window’s pixels — anything else on your screen was never in it.

This is the most reliable method because it is not a trick. Nothing is being hidden; your notes simply were not part of what you chose to share. The catch is that it constrains you: switch apps mid-demo and your audience sees nothing.

2. Put your notes on a second display

Share Display 1, keep your notes on Display 2. Full-screen capture grabs one display at a time, so the other one is untouched.

Also completely reliable, and it requires a second monitor — which is exactly what you will not have on a laptop in a meeting room.

3. Use a window that excludes itself from capture

macOS lets an app mark its own windows as non-capturable. The window renders normally on your display and is skipped when the screen is captured, so it is missing from recordings, screenshots and shares while staying perfectly visible to you.

This is what cluepad does, and it is the only one of the three that works while sharing your entire screen. We tested it on macOS 26.3 against all three capture paths macOS offers — including the live stream API that Zoom, Teams and OBS use — and the note was present on screen and absent from the capture every time.

What none of these protect against

All three work by controlling what macOS puts into a capture. Nothing that bypasses macOS is covered:

• A phone or camera pointed at your screen.
• An HDMI capture box between your Mac and a display.
• AirPlay or display mirroring, which is output, not capture.
• Someone remote-controlling your Mac via Screen Sharing.

Any tool claiming to be undetectable in those situations is overpromising.

What we would actually do

Use cluepad and share whichever way suits the meeting. If the material is genuinely sensitive — unreleased numbers, someone’s salary — share a single window as well. Two independent protections cost you nothing and do not depend on the same assumption.