unclutter - Man Page
rewrite of unclutter using the X11-Xfixes extension
Examples (TL;DR)
- Hide mouse cursor after 3 seconds:
unclutter -idle 3
Synopsis
unclutter [--timeout seconds] [--jitter radius] [--exclude-root] [--ignore-scrolling] [--ignore-buttons buttons] [--hide-on-touch] [--fork|-b] [--help|-h] [--version|-v] [--start-hidden]
Compatibility arguments:
unclutter [--display|-d display] [--idle seconds] [--keystroke] [--grab] [--noevents] [--reset] [--root] [--onescreen] [--not] name ...
Description
Hide the mouse cursor if it isn’t being used.
This version of unclutter is a rewrite of the original and uses the x11-xfixes extension, which means that no fake windows or pointer grabbing is needed. This should work better with window managers and applications.
Options
- --timeout seconds
Specifies the number of seconds after which the cursor should be hidden if it was neither moved nor any button was pressed. (Default: 5)
- --jitter radius
Ignore cursor movements if the cursor hasn’t moved at least radius pixels.
- --exclude-root
Don’t hide the mouse cursor if it is idling over the root window and not an actual window since in this case it isn’t obscuring anything important, but rather just the desktop background.
- --ignore-scrolling
Ignore mouse scroll events (buttons 4 and 5) so that scrolling doesn’t unhide the cursor. This is a shortcut for --ignore-buttons 4,5. If you want to ignore horizontal scrolling as well, use --ignore-buttons instead by specifying all buttons manually (e.g. 4,5,6,7).
- --ignore-buttons
Defines the mouse buttons which do not unhide the cursor when clicked. You can pass multiple button numbers by separating them with ,.
- --hide-on-touch
Hides the mouse cursor on touch events.
- --start-hidden
Starts the cursor hidden.
- --fork|-b
Fork unclutter to the background.
- --help|-h
Display the usage and exit.
- --version|-v
Display the version and exit.
Troubleshooting
--ignore-scrolling doesn’t work
This can happen, especially on trackpoints, if other button events, e.g. for horizontal scrolling, are sent as well. You can try adding some jitter, or verify by using xev -event button. If you want to ignore horizontal scrolling as well, use --ignore-buttons instead of --ignore-scrolling.
Compatibility
In order to be used as a drop-in replacement of unclutter, unclutter-xfixes accepts all command line arguments of unclutter, but ignores most of them.
- --display|-d display
Specifies the X display to use. The same effect can be achieved by setting the DISPLAY environment variable.
- --idle seconds
This argument is mapped to --timeout.
- --keystroke
This argument is ignored.
- --grab
This argument is ignored.
- --noevents
This argument is ignored.
- --reset
This argument is ignored.
- --root
This argument does the opposite of --exclude-root. Shouldn’t need to be given, as this is the default behavior in unclutter-xfixes.
- --onescreen
This argument restricts unclutter to the single screen specified in --display or to the default screen of the display.
- --not
This argument will result in all arguments that aren’t options or option arguments, to be collected into a list that specifies windows where the cursor shall not be removed. These will be the windows where an element of the list matches, in a case insensitive comparison, the starting characters of either the WM_NAME, or the name or class of the WM_CLASS, properties of the window. (Note that this argument can be given anywhere on the command line.)
Author
Ingo Bürk <ingo.buerk@airblader.de>
Author.