Hide the Mouse

I rarely use mice — in fact, since 2008 I have not even owned one. Since I bought my first laptop, the most I use to move the cursor is a graphics tablet, my keyboard shortcuts and the touchpad when I am not too far from the laptop.

The problem is that the cursor often sits in front of whatever I am doing and I need to hide it somehow. In this post I will show two simple solutions to that problem.

1. Move the cursor

The simplest solution is to move the cursor to the corner of the screen, where it does not bother me. Until recently, moving the cursor meant taking my hand off the keyboard or repeatedly pressing my shortcut key, which only moves 10 pixels at a time. xdotool solved that:

First install the program:

sudo pacman -S xdotool

Move the cursor to the top left corner:

xdotool mousemove 0 0

Move the cursor to the top right corner (assuming your screen is no bigger than full HD):

xdotool mousemove 1920 1080

So I do not have to type that in the terminal, I added this command to my shortcuts in .xbindkeysrc:

# Move to the bottom right corner
"xdotool mousemove_relative 1920 1080"
KP_Begin

KP_Begin corresponds to the 5 key on my numeric keypad.

Hide the cursor when idle

We can use unclutter to hide the cursor.

Install unclutter:

sudo pacman -S unclutter

Just type unclutter & in the terminal. The default is to hide the mouse after 5s of inactivity. Some options can also be useful:

noevents - Does not send an EnterNotify event. It may not work well with some programs:

unclutter -idle 5 -noevents &

grab - I noticed it could not hide the cursor when it was over Pidgin in AwesomeWM (the cursor kept flickering). This command changes the method used to grab the cursor in order to hide it:

unclutter -grab

Notes:

• Put these commands in .xinitrc so they run when X starts.
• Some programs such as xtrlock will only work when the mouse is visible

Links

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Unclutter