Automatically hide your mouse cursor with Unclutter

If you almost never use the computer mouse like me, you are most likely also finding the mouse cursor distracting and in the way of your work. But there’s actually a way of automatically hiding it when it’s not being used and it’s made possible with the tool Unclutter, or more preferably with unclutter-xfixes.

Unclutter is actually an old tool, and the latest version of it dates back to 1996, this is why the user Airblader (the person behind i3-gaps) decided to fork the project under the name unclutter-xfixes and bring it up to date.

But with that said, I’ve been using the old Unclutter until recently and I have never had any issues with it. So it should work just fine, but unclutter-xfixes is the recommended choice.

Usage

Using Unclutter/unclutter-xfixes is nothing more than running the command unclutter. And if you check out the manual, you will find a few optional flags to tinker with, like the flag --timeout <n> which changes the number of seconds after which the cursor should be hidden.

Installation

Unclutter

Unclutter is both available in the repositories for Arch Linux and Ubuntu as unclutter:

Arch Linux:

# pacman -S unclutter

Ubuntu:

# apt install unclutter

unclutter-xfixes

Arch Linux:

unclutter-xfixes is available via the Arch User Repo as the package unclutter-xfixes-git.

Ubuntu:

If you’re using Ubuntu (or most likely any other Linux distribution) you then need to compile it yourself.

Start with installing the dependencies:

# apt install build-essential libev-dev libx11-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev pkg-config

And optionally you also might want to install the package asciidoc if you want to include the manual. Do note that I needed to download more than 700MB worth of packages for that, which is why I only added it as a optional dependency. But it’s only needed when compiling the package, so it’s okay to uninstall it when you done compiling unclutter-xfixes.

And lastly, continue to download the source code and compile it:

$ git clone https://github.com/Airblader/unclutter-xfixes
$ cd unclutter-xfixes
$ make
# make install