unclutter - Man Page

rewrite of unclutter using the X11-Xfixes extension

Examples (TL;DR)

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.

Info

07/20/2024