How do you hide the mouse pointer under Linux/X11?

Question

How do I hide the mouse pointer under X11? I would like to use the built in libraries in order to do this and not something like SDL (SDL_ShowCursor(0)) or glut (glutSetCur

Answer 1

There is a -no-cursor option for Xorg 1.7 and later. https://www.x.org/wiki/AdvancedTopicsFAQ/

xinit -- -nocursor or startx -- -nocursor could work.

Answer 2

an alternative to unclutter

Unclutter didn't work for me, as it doesn't play well with hardware accelerated surfaces (such as for example those produced by intels' VA-API when decoding video). So I found a program that hid the mouse pointer in a less roundabout way, hhp, and rewrote it in C with minimal dependencies, the result is hhpc. I did this to obviate the need to have haskell to compile it and because hhp sometimes stopped hiding the mouse pointer.

hhpc, relies only on glibc and xlib, so it's easy to build, just do make release. You can get the code and instructions from my repository. It's very memory and CPU efficient (because it does almost nothing).

Answer 3

All right!

I guess this post may be getting a little bit old, but if what I've found can help some of us, I definitely have to post it here ;)

I found myself a clean and simple solution that works fine, without using "xcb" ( for what I tried to achieve, it was a little over-engineering (..)

---

All you need is the xsetroot command, with appropriate arguments:

To hide the mouse cursor, you need an extra little file (I called mine blnk_ptr.xbm)

the content of this file:

#define blnk_ptr_width 1
#define blnk_ptr_height 1
#define blnk_ptr_x_hot 0
#define blnk_ptr_y_hot 0
static unsigned char blnk_ptr_bits[] = { 0x00 };

Then, we can use the two following commands:

• To hide the mouse pointer cursor,

  $ xsetroot -cursor blnk_ptr.xbm blnk_ptr.xbm
  

• To show the mouse pointer cursor again,

  $ xsetroot -cursor_name left_ptr
  

  (You can use a mouse pointer cursor other than "left_ptr", but this one seems to be widely available across *nix systems (..)

Btw, I don't know yet how to get the name of the pointer currently used by the system using xsetroot. I guess I'll [as usual] digg that too, but I'd be happy to have someone who knows the how-to giving me the answer ( It'd be nice ;) )

Enjoy ? ;p

Answer 4

There is an X11 extension called Fixes which has a function one can use to hide the cursor. The advantage of this function is that this sends a message to the X server which hides the sprite. No trick (i.e. invisible cursor from a pixmap) and from what I understand it works on the entire screen.

#include <X11/extensions/Xfixes.h>

...

    XFixesHideCursor(dpy, window);
    XFlush(dpy); // not required unless you want an immediate effect

Source: How to hide the mouse cursor in X11/Xorg

Answer 5

I'd rather use simpler method:

unclutter -idle 0

You almost do not see cursor, still it is available. To disable mouse:

rmmod psmouse

Or disable mouse module permanently somewhere in /etc/. See your distribution manual.

Answer 6

Use xbanish! It "banish the mouse cursor when typing"! Start it with

xbanish &

and enjoy!