xhidecursor is a minimal X-application which hides the cursor on key-press and unhides the cursor on mouse-movement. The two main advantages compared to other popular alternatives like xbanish are:
-
Simplicity: xhidecursor
~40 SLOCvs. xbanish~488 SLOC. This is because xhidecursor only uses the XFIXES-Extension to hide the cursor while xbanish implements many different methods. -
Performance: If stress-tested on a i5-8350U CPU by moving the mouse erratically around htop shows a CPU-Utilization of
0%for xhidecursor and up to1.3%for xbanish. This is because xhidecursor only listens to the first mouse-movement to unhide the cursor and ignores all the following mouse-movements. xbanish on the other hand processes every single mouse-movement even if the mouse is already visible. The same goes for key-presses.
- libx11
- libxi
- libxfixes
make install