xbanish hides the mouse cursor when you start typing, and shows it again
when the mouse cursor moves or a mouse button is pressed. This is
similar to xterm’s pointerMode
setting, but xbanish works globally in
the X11 session.
unclutter’s -keystroke mode is supposed to do this, but it’s broken. I looked into fixing it, but unclutter was abandoned so I wrote xbanish.
The name comes from ratpoison’s “banish” command that sends the cursor to the corner of the screen.
Additional build requirements:
sudo apt install x11proto-dev libx11-dev libxt-dev libxext-dev libxfixes-dev libxi-dev
dnf install make libXi-devel libXfixes-devel libXt-devel libX11-devel
If the XInput extension is supported, xbanish uses it to request input from all attached keyboards and mice. If XInput 2.2 is supported, raw mouse movement and button press inputs are requested which helps detect cursor movement while in certain applications such as Chromium.
If Xinput is not available, xbanish recurses through the list of windows
starting at the root, and calls XSelectInput()
on each window to
receive notification of mouse motion, button presses, and key presses.
In response to any available keyboard input events, the cursor is hidden. On mouse movement or button events, the cursor is shown.
xbanish initially hid the cursor by calling XGrabPointer()
with a
blank cursor image, similar to unclutter’s -grab mode, but this had
problematic interactions with certain X applications. For example, xlock
could not grab the pointer and sometimes didn’t lock, xwininfo wouldn’t
work at all, Firefox would quickly hide the Awesome Bar dropdown as soon
as a key was pressed, and xterm required two middle-clicks to paste the
clipboard contents.
To avoid these problems and simplify the implementation, xbanish now
uses the modern Xfixes
extension
to easily hide and show the cursor with XFixesHideCursor()
and
XFixesShowCursor()
.