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Hiding an idle mouse cursor on Ubuntu

One of the obscure features of OS X that I love is that the mouse cursor hides itself when idle. By doing so, it stays out of the way when reading on-screen. When I made the shift to using Ubuntu at work, the non-hiding cursor was one of those little details that annoyed me. Of course, like most things on linux, someone else had the same opinion and has solved the problem already. The solution is a tool called unclutter (easily installable with a sudo apt-get install unclutter.)

Unclutter takes a few optional parameters. I like: unclutter -idle 1, which hides the cursor after one second of inactivity. The hidden cursor not eliminates the potential annoyance while reading on-screen, but may also serve to remind the user that keyboard shortcuts are faster anyway ;-)

For more, see: unclutter: hide the mouse cursor after a period of inactivity