Hiding the X cursor?

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 01:37:21PM -0700, Tyler McClung wrote:
> It seems I came in a little too late to reply on the old thread, but  
> that's fine.
> 
> I'm attempting to (temporarily) hide the cursor in an embedded system  
> running matchbox-window-manager.  I am able to hide the mouse for all  
> newly opened windows, but old windows do not change.  I do not want to  
> restart the wm for the changes to be global.  Here are the things I've  
> tried:
> 
> 1.  Apply an invisible mouse theme via matchbox-remote -theme
> Fail: Did not change anything
> 
> 2.  Configure/change default icon file to point to xcursor-transparent
> Fail:  Works for new windows + root, but not for old windows (works if  
> wm is restarted)
> 
> 3.  Send events to matchbox-window-manager by rewriting the source  
> code for the wm as well as matchbox-remote.
> Fail:  Does the same thing as attempt 2.
> 
> I believe the reason why 2 and 3 do not work is matchbox or X  
> maintains a cache of the applied cursors for each window that is open  
> and does not mess with the cache for windows that are already open.  I  
> am unsure if this is how it really works, but I am having trouble  
> changing the old windows.
> 
> Is there a way to hide the cursor on the fly without restarting the  
> server or window manager?
> 
> If you're wondering why, I'm attempting to write a little program to  
> toggle the view of the cursor on the system because the user may want  
> to use the touchscreen, the touchpad, or a mouse; plus some programs  
> would be cooler without the cursor.
> 

shouldn't XFixesHideCursor and XFixesShowCursor do the job? 
(disclaimer: haven't actually used it)

Cheers,
  Peter