Manual hide the mouse cursor in full-screen

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1

When I watch a movie in full-screen mode, I want to hide the mouse cursor. But by default it is visible with Qubes-OS. With the below procedure you will hide the mouse cursor with the Alt+F12 keyboard shortcut with the help of the unclutter command.

In dom0:

  • install the unclutter package : sudo qubes-dom0-update unclutter
  • create the toggle-unclutter.sh shell script :
mkdir $HOME/bin
cat << 'EOF' | tee $HOME/bin/toggle-unclutter.sh
#! /bin/sh
if pgrep unclutter &> /dev/null 2>&1
then
  killall unclutter
else
  unclutter -idle 1 &
fi
EOF
chmod +x $HOME/bin/toggle-unclutter.sh
  • add a keyboard shortcut to launch this script for hide/show the mouse cursor
  • for xfce : System Tools / Keyboard, Application Shortcuts, Add : browse to the above script → choose a shortcut (for example Alt-F12)

The first Alt-F12 hides the cursor, the second Alt-F12 shows the cursor.

Credits : vecna13 from the 2676 issue. In this issue you will find other solutions and some security concerns.

The shortcut added in the ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts.xml file.

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2

Upgraded script to automatically hide the cursor if the active window is in fullscreen and unhide it if the window is not in fullscreen.
You can toggle this to enable/disable by running the script with shortcut.

#!/bin/bash
shopt -s lastpipe
pgrep -f '^/bin/bash.*toggle-unclutter.sh$' 2>/dev/null | grep -v ^$$\$ | PIDS=$(cat)
if [ -n "$PIDS" ]
then
    kill $PIDS &>/dev/null
    killall -q unclutter
else
    while true
    do
        if xprop -id $(xprop -root 32x '\t$0' _NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW 2>/dev/null | cut -f 2) _NET_WM_STATE 2>/dev/null | grep -q _NET_WM_STATE_FULLSCREEN
        then
            if ! pgrep -x unclutter &>/dev/null
            then
                unclutter --timeout 1 --fork
            fi
        else
            killall -q unclutter
        fi
        sleep 1
    done
fi

You can upgrade the script further and enable unclutter only for specific windows for which you’ve pressed the shortcut.
Get the window ID in the script and add/remove it in some temp file e.g. /run/unclutter-windows.
Check in the script if the windows in the file exist and remove from the file the windows that are closed.
Then check in infinite loop in the script whatever the active window is listed in this file and start unclutter if it is.

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