Enhancement: hide on key press

[bryangeplant]

Hey, love this package! Was wondering if it'd be easy to implement a flag that hides on keyboard press.

[Airblader]

Do you mean on any keyboard input, or to configure some specific key that hides the cursor?

[Barbaross93]

I would also be interested in such a feature. Personally, I think it should be any keyboard input as the assumption is that if the user is typing, they likely don't need the mouse. Although a manual toggle would be a nice feature as well, it could technically be done with a simple shell script and a keybinding.

[Airblader]

For hiding it on any keyboard input, have you looked into using xbanish instead? Maybe that would suffice for you?

[Barbaross93]

I've been using it for a while, but unfortunately it lacks the ability to keep the cursor hidden while scrolling. There's a PR for it but it seems to not be going anywhere.

EDIT
I Just tried pinging that PR. Maybe things will get moving again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[Barbaross93]

Well, looks like it was merged! The git version also has a timeout feature like unclutter @bryangeplant, you may just want to switch to it instead.

[Airblader]

Glad to see pinging moved it along. I'll wait for more feedback on whether this is still needed in unclutter.

[bryangeplant]

Oh nice! Sorry for the delay, was traveling. Thanks, I'll hop on to it!

[bryangeplant]

Do you mean on any keyboard input, or to configure some specific key that hides the cursor?

Yes I meant all

[TheStutterNerd]

A feature to toggle the state through an argument would be pretty nice. It'd give you the ability to bind to a key within any window manager and utilise in scripts.

For example, say I only want to use unclutter whilst qutebrowser is focused then I could have a script to do so.

I understand you could just run/kill the process within the script but it would be nice to just have a simple argument for it. Such as xclutter -t to toggle.

More native control is always a bonus.

I've only just come across this project so I've not looked at the code yet but I'd assume its only the matter of a few lines. I'll probably fork and put in a request but just leaving this here incase I don't. 😛

[Airblader]

This would require some inter-process communication, which is certainly more than a few lines of code and not something I’m keen on adding.

In theory a simple interface could be created through signals, but I don’t think there’s any obvious benefits over simply restarting the binary. If you want to make toggling easy, wrap it into a systemd service that you can pause and resume.

I’ll close this for now but happy to consider any arguments someone wants to bring forward for adding this complexity directly into the tool. Please keep in mind that this project is quite inactive, so I’d like to keep maintenance cost low.

[Airblader]

Oops, I thought that above comment was a new issue, didn’t notice it was just a comment on the existing issue.

[Penguin-Guru]

This seems like a great idea to me. I wonder if xbanish would be interested in merging, or at least sharing code. I'm sure I'm not the only user who would prefer not to need two such specific utilities with overlapping functionality. 🤔

Personally, I would want the hide effect to trigger on all keys except a blacklist of modifiers, like shift and control. Ideally, I suppose the utility would allow for both black and white lists.

[Airblader]

xbanish is written with Xlib, uncluttered-xfixes with XCB. They’re not incompatible per se but my guess is neither project would want to mix these.