OpenCrosshair

A crosshair overlay for Windows games. Free, open source, and small: a single 11.3 MB exe written in Rust that uses just a few MB of RAM while it sits in the tray.

It draws your crosshair in a transparent, click-through window on top of the game. It never touches the game itself: no DLL injection, no hooks, no reading game memory. Still, check your game's rules before using any overlay in competitive play.

• Line crosshairs with length, thickness, gap, outline, T-style, centre dot and circle. Common colours are one click away.
• Pixel canvas up to 64×64 for anything the sliders can't do, with mirrored painting and undo.
• Your own images: pick a picture or drop one on the window (PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, ICO, TIFF, WebP), then set its size and opacity. It's copied into the app's folder, so moving the original doesn't break it.
• Presets, and a different preset for each game. Click a preset's name to rename it. Export them to a .opencrosshair file (pictures included) to share or back up, and import files from others.
• While aiming: hide the crosshair or switch to another preset while you hold (or toggle) a mouse button, for games with aim down sights. Set a default, then give any game its own rule, or tell it to ignore aiming altogether (so right-click can do nothing in one game and something in another).
• Games only mode: the crosshair shows while one of your games is focused and hides everywhere else. Games are listed by their real name and icon, read from the game's own exe.
• Light and dark themes. It follows Windows' app mode, or you can pick one in Settings.
• Keyboard and screen reader friendly: every control can be reached with Tab, and the window is exposed to Windows UI Automation, which is what screen readers such as Narrator and NVDA read. It also follows Windows' accessibility settings for animation effects, text size and contrast themes.
• Lives in the tray, out of your way and out of Alt+Tab. Click the icon for the settings.
• Rebindable global hotkeys: F8 toggles the crosshair, F9 opens the settings.
• Start with Windows, straight to the tray.
• Automatic updates from GitHub releases. It waits until you've left your game before restarting.
• Stays in the middle of the screen. If a game runs on your second monitor it follows the game there, and games you play in a window can be set to centre on that window instead.

Image	Games	Presets	Settings

The same pages in the light theme:

Crosshair	Games

Each game can follow your default aiming rule or have its own. Here Counter-Strike 2 is set to keep the crosshair as it is, so the mouse button does nothing there, while other games still switch or hide it:

There are good crosshair overlays already. Here's how OpenCrosshair lines up against the popular ones, going by each project's own store page or README in October 2026. A dash means the page doesn't say.

Where OpenCrosshair is different

• It's light. One exe with no browser engine inside. Simple Sight's install folder, for comparison, is 525 MB; it and CrossOver are built on Electron, which bundles a copy of Chromium. OpenCrosshair idles at a few MB of RAM in the tray and uses no measurable CPU while you play.
• It's yours to change. MIT licensed, so you can fork it, ship it, or build it into something else.
• It figures out the game for you. It notices which game is in front, switches to that game's preset and hides itself everywhere else, with no profiles to switch by hand.
• Nothing to break with game updates. It doesn't hook into games or rely on Game Bar, so a game patch or a Windows update has nothing to break.

What it doesn't do (yet)

• True exclusive fullscreen. Nothing can draw over it without hooking into the game or going through Xbox Game Bar, and Game Bar widgets have to be written in C# or C++ and published through the Microsoft Store. Most games don't need it, though: see Fullscreen below.
• A shared library of crosshairs from other players.
• macOS and Linux.

Download OpenCrosshair-Setup.exe from the latest release and run it. It installs for your user account only, so it doesn't need admin rights, and you can remove it from Apps & features like anything else.

If you'd rather not install anything, download OpenCrosshair.exe instead and run it from wherever you like.

The exe isn't code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen may warn you the first time. Click More info, then Run anyway.

OpenCrosshair draws a window on top of the game, so the game has to let other windows sit above it.

• Borderless and windowed always work.
• "Fullscreen" in most modern games works too. Since Windows 10, DirectX 11 and 12 games that ask for fullscreen usually get Windows' fullscreen optimizations, which behave like borderless underneath.
• True exclusive fullscreen takes over the display, and nothing can draw above it without hooking into the game, which this deliberately doesn't do. That happens when Disable fullscreen optimizations is ticked for the game's exe, and some older games can still end up there.

OpenCrosshair checks the second case for you. If one of your games has that box ticked, the Games page says so and has a Turn them back on button. That only changes your own account, needs no admin rights, and leaves any other compatibility settings on the exe alone. The sidebar also shows Fullscreen while Windows reports a game running Direct3D fullscreen, as a hint to check this if you can't see the crosshair.

If a game still hides it, use borderless mode.

• F8 shows or hides the crosshair, F9 shows or hides the settings window. Both can be changed under Settings.
• Click the tray icon for the settings; right-click it to toggle the crosshair or quit. On Windows 11 a new tray icon starts out behind the ^ arrow, and you can drag it onto the taskbar.
• Closing the settings window hides it to the tray; the crosshair keeps running.
• Launching OpenCrosshair while it's already running just brings up the settings.
• Settings are saved as you change them, to %APPDATA%\OpenCrosshair\settings.json.
• If it ever crashes, the details are written to %APPDATA%\OpenCrosshair\crash.log. Attaching that file to an issue helps a lot.

The overlay is a layered window (WS_EX_LAYERED | WS_EX_TRANSPARENT) drawn with UpdateLayeredWindow. It's redrawn only when the crosshair actually changes, so while you play it uses no measurable CPU.

Focus changes come from an out-of-context SetWinEventHook, so there's no polling and nothing is loaded into other processes. When the focused app is one of your games, the crosshair moves to the middle of the monitor that game is on, or to the middle of the game's window for games marked as windowed.

"While aiming" only checks the mouse button (about 60 times a second, with GetAsyncKeyState) while one of your games is in front and that game's rule (its own, or the default) has an action set. It reads the button's state; it never installs an input hook.

Pictures are decoded by the Windows Imaging Component that ships with Windows, so there's no image library in the exe either.

The settings window uses egui. With it open the app uses about 40 MB of its own memory, mostly the window's OpenGL context and fonts. Task Manager may show more, because its figure includes memory shared with the graphics driver. When it's hidden those pages sit untouched, so the app hands them back to Windows and drops to a few MB or less until you open the window again.

The interface is set in Windows' own Segoe UI and Consolas, read from the Windows fonts folder, so no font is bundled (egui's built-in fonts take over if those files are missing). Screen reader support comes from egui's AccessKit integration: it adds about 0.3 MB to the exe and costs nothing while idle. Colours are two palettes, light and dark, and their text colours are checked against WCAG contrast (4.5:1 for text, 3:1 for control outlines).

Game names come from each exe's version info (what Task Manager shows), then its window title, and the icons come straight from the exe through the Shell API. The app icon is drawn from code in build.rs at compile time, so there's no icon file to keep in sync.

Updates go through WinHTTP, which is part of Windows, so no TLS library ships with the app. A running exe can't be overwritten, but it can be renamed: the updater downloads the new build, checks it arrived complete, swaps the two files and restarts.

OpenCrosshair-Setup.exe is the same binary as OpenCrosshair.exe. When its file name contains "setup", it installs itself instead of starting up.

You need Rust (stable) and the Windows SDK, which comes with the Visual Studio Build Tools.

cargo build --release

The exe ends up in target/release/OpenCrosshair.exe. Copy it to a name containing setup if you want the installer.

Bump version in Cargo.toml, commit, then tag and push:

git tag v0.5.8
git push origin v0.5.8

GitHub Actions builds the release and attaches both exes. Installed copies check every six hours and update themselves.

Releases are unsigned until code signing is set up, so Windows SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher. To turn signing on, apply to the SignPath Foundation's open-source program, create a project named OpenCrosshair with a release-signing policy, then add the repository secret SIGNPATH_API_TOKEN and the repository variable SIGNPATH_ORGANIZATION_ID. The release workflow signs the exe automatically once both are present.

MIT. See LICENSE.