How to hide a teleprompter from a Zoom screen share
If you read from a script during calls, you have probably had the moment where you share your screen and realise your notes went with it. This explains why that happens, what actually stops it, and how to check before it matters.
Why your notes show up
When you share a screen, Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Loom, OBS and QuickTime all ask macOS for the contents of that display. They do not decide what is in the picture. The window server does, and by default it includes every window on that screen, including anything floating on top.
So the usual workarounds are all about geography rather than capture. Put the script on a second monitor, share a single window instead of the whole screen, put your notes on your phone propped against the laptop. They work, but each one costs you something: a spare display, the ability to move between windows, or looking away from the camera.
What actually stops it
macOS lets an application mark one of its own windows as excluded from capture. It is the same mechanism a password manager uses to keep your vault out of a screen recording. The window stays on your screen and is simply not handed to whatever is recording.
It has to be the app itself that asks. There is no setting in Zoom, and no macOS preference, that lets you exclude somebody else's window. That is why a normal notes app or a browser tab cannot be hidden this way, however you arrange them.
Check it yourself, before it matters
Do not take anyone's word for this, including mine. It takes about thirty seconds:
- Put the prompter on screen with your script in it.
- Press Shift, Command and 5, then record the whole screen for a few seconds.
- Stop, and play the recording back.
If the prompter is missing from the recording, it will be missing from your call, because a screen share and a screen recording ask macOS for the same thing. If it is there, do not rely on it.
Promptur does this
Promptur is a Mac teleprompter that sits just under your camera and scrolls at the pace you actually speak, rather than at a fixed speed you set in advance. It asks macOS to leave its window out of screen recordings and shared screens, and that setting is on by default.
Measured rather than assumed: on macOS 26, a capture taken through the same path Zoom, Meet, Loom and OBS all record with contained zero pixels of the prompter, against 600,000 pixels when the setting is switched off. The test that produces those numbers is in the repository, so you can run it yourself.
One honest caveat. This is a request to the window server, not a guarantee, and it has been reported to behave differently across macOS versions. Run the thirty second check above before you rely on it for something that matters.