Lost your pointer? Shake it. Four screens, a 4K panel, a dark theme, and somewhere in there is a 32-pixel arrow. Shook brings it back: give the mouse a quick shake and the pointer lands right where you can see it, with a ripple or a spotlight so your eyes find it too. Built light, on purpose: that's why it exists. Shook is one 4.5 MB exe with no installer. It sleeps until the mouse moves: 0% CPU while it waits and about 2 MB of memory, and it gets out of the way when you're dragging, drawing or gaming. Shook is donationware. It's free to use, for good: no trial, no locked features, no account. If it saves you a hunt, a small donation keeps the lab building more tools like it.

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✦ What it does

Featherweight	Plain Win32 in Rust that sleeps until the mouse moves: zero CPU while it waits, about 2 MB of private memory, no polling, no timers. The UI only exists while it's on screen.
Shake to find	A few quick side-to-side shakes and the pointer jumps into view. Slow drags, long sweeps and hand tremor never set it off.
Lands where you want	The middle of the screen you're on, your main screen or any screen you pick, the middle of the window you're working in, a spot you pick, or right where it is.
Hard to miss	A ripple or a spotlight, in your color and at your size, that follows the pointer while it plays. A soft two-note chime, if you like.
Stays put when it lands	Your hand is still moving when Shook fires, so the pointer is held on its landing spot until the mouse settles. It never gets dragged away again.
Tuned to your hand	Calibrate: shake the way you always do and Shook sets its own threshold. A live meter shows every stroke and how close you are to a shake.
Stays out of the way	Ignores shakes while a mouse button is held, while a game or video is full screen, and in any app you list. Pause it from the tray.
Hotkey, too	Rather press a key? Set one (like Ctrl+Alt+M) and Shook finds the pointer without a shake.

✦ A look inside

Settings (right-click the tray icon, or just run Shook.exe again): Shake: how hard, how many wiggles, and Calibrate. The meter shows your last strokes as bars; the ones over the pink line count. Where it lands: five modes and a live map of your screens with your pointer on it. Click a screen to land there, or click anywhere in A spot you pick mode. Make it obvious: Ripple, Spotlight or None, six colors plus a picker, size, sound, and a Try it button. Behavior: hotkey, the ignore rules, Start with Windows, and the hello card. Every change saves on its own; there's no Save button. The hello card says hi when Shook starts (you can turn it off):

✦ Get started

1. Download Shook.exe and run it. There's nothing to install.
2. Windows may say it doesn't recognize the publisher yet (Shook isn't code-signed). Choose More info, then Run anyway.
3. Shook settles into your tray (bottom right, maybe under the ^ arrow) and opens its settings once to say hello.
4. Lost the pointer? Shake the mouse quickly side to side. That's it.
5. Want it every time? Turn on Start with Windows in the settings.

System requirements

System	Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit
Processor	Anything that runs Windows 10
Memory	About 2 MB while it waits
Disk	One 4.5 MB file
Graphics	OpenGL 2 for the settings window (any GPU from the last decade)
Input	Any mouse or touchpad. Pen tablets, remote desktop and VMs send absolute positions; Shook handles those too.

The tray menu

Right-click the icon: Find my pointer · Pause shake to find · Settings… · Donate ♥ · Shook on the web · Quit Shook. Left-click opens the settings.

✦ Light, measured

Light is the point of Shook, so here are the numbers, read from Windows' own counters on a 2013 ThinkPad (i7-4600U) running Windows 10:

Waiting for a shake	0% CPU: under 1 M CPU cycles in 10 seconds
Private memory	1.8 MB (8.5 MB working set)
Mouse moving nonstop at 1000 reports/second	about 3% of one core on that 2013 CPU
While paused	Shook unregisters from mouse input entirely: zero work

How it stays that light:

• The always-running part is plain Win32: a hidden window that receives raw mouse input (RIDEV_INPUTSINK) and blocks in GetMessage until the mouse moves. No hooks in the input chain, no polling, no timers.
• The settings window and the hello card are separate, short-lived processes of the same exe (egui). Nothing graphical stays loaded while Shook waits.
• The effects are click-through layered windows that exist for about a second, drawn by Shook's own anti-aliased renderer. The spotlight's dim layer is a single-alpha window with a round hole in its region, so even a 4K screen costs nothing to dim.

How a shake is recognized

Each axis is tracked on its own, using raw sensor counts (before Windows applies pointer speed, so a pointer stuck at a screen edge still sees the whole shake). A stroke is movement in one direction; it ends when the mouse reverses by more than a few counts. A stroke counts toward a shake when it's long enough to not be tremor, quick enough to not be a drag (under 450 ms), and faster than your How hard setting. Wiggles direction changes in a row, with no pause over 220 ms, make a shake. Up-and-down and little circles work too.

✦ Settings file

Everything lives in %APPDATA%\Shook\settings.toml (the settings window writes it; you can edit it by hand, then choose Settings in the tray to reload).

Key	Default	Meaning
paused	false	Shaking does nothing (the hotkey still works)
speed	4.0	How hard to shake, 1 (gentle) to 10 (vigorous)
wiggles	4	Direction changes in a row that make a shake, 3 to 8
landing	"screen-center"	screen-center, window-center, spot or stay-put
screen	"pointer"	For screen-center: pointer, primary or a display like \\.\DISPLAY2
spot	—	For spot: [x, y] in physical pixels on the desktop
effect	"ripple"	ripple, spotlight or off
color	"#C6FF3A"	The effect color
size	1.0	Effect size, 0.6 to 2.0
sound	false	The chime
hotkey	""	Like "Ctrl+Alt+M"; empty = off
ignore_dragging	true	Ignore shakes while a mouse button is held
ignore_fullscreen	true	Ignore shakes while something is full screen
ignore_apps	[]	Program names to ignore shakes in, like ["photoshop.exe"]
hello_card	true	Show the hello card at start

✦ Privacy

Shook never connects to the internet. It reads mouse movement on your PC, writes its settings file, and that's all. The Donate and website buttons just open your browser. No telemetry, no analytics, no update checks.

✦ Uninstall

Turn off Start with Windows, choose Quit Shook in the tray, then delete Shook.exe and the %APPDATA%\Shook folder.

✦ Build it yourself

You need Rust (stable, MSVC toolchain) and the Windows SDK (for the icon and manifest resources).

git clone https://github.com/AcidAlchamy/shook
cd shook
cargo build --release

The exe is target\release\shook.exe. Run the tests with cargo test.

The art is made from source too: python art/icons.py renders the icons from SVG (needs Edge and Pillow), and cargo test dump_frames -- --ignored with SHOOK_FRAMES=art/build/frames, then python art/effects.py, draws the README's effect images with the same renderer the app uses.

src/
  main.rs          one exe, three faces: resident, --settings, --hello
  shake.rs         the shake detector (pure, unit-tested)
  config.rs        settings.toml
  live.rs          shared memory for the live meter and calibration
  resident/        raw input, tray, landing, the effects, the chime
  ui/              the settings window and hello card (egui)

✦ Donationware

Shook is free, and it stays free. It's open source under the MIT license, so you can read every line of it.

If it earns its keep on your desk, please consider a donation: acidalchamy.com/donationware/shook. Donations fund the hours, the hardware and the next small tool on the donationware shelf.

_{Shook · made by Acid Alchamy · donationware}