How to disable mouse cursor on LXDE?

Question

I am using the Pi as display only device,to show a video feed, so I have no icons and no wallpaper. But the mouse cursor is right there in the middle and when I start the video it gets bigger because of the video resolution. So I wanted to disable it completely.

Any help?

(off-topic) Setting the wallpaper to a blank screen or reducing that inactivity time where the screens blanks wold be useful too.

score 12 · Answer 1 · edited Dec 30 '16 at 10:54

12

The following:

sudo apt-get install unclutter
unclutter -display :0 -noevents -grab

is known to work perfectly on Raspbian Wheezy.

edited Dec 30 '16 at 10:54

techraf

4,353
10
32
43

answered Oct 20 '13 at 04:26

lenik

11,533
2
32
37

score 10 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:56

The X server has an option -nocursor which would permanently turn off the mouse cursor.

You'd need to edit /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc to add the option to the default X startup.

I looked around for other places to possibly inject the additional option (-nocursor), but nothing else comes to mind that is display manager agnostic (LXDE, KDE, GNOME, AwesomewM, Fluxbox, etc).

Unclutter (mentioned by @lenik) is also a good solution, although it's often not invoked until a user logs in, which may or may not happen in your case, depending on how you're using the system.

score 3 · Answer 3 · edited Aug 14 '17 at 08:32

3

Edit the file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf by, for example using nano:

# nano /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf

First find the line xserver-command=X, you can do this in nano using:

ctrl+w xserver-command=X

uncomment the line and add:

-nocursor

So it looks like this:

xserver-command=X -nocursor

edited Aug 14 '17 at 08:32

Darth Vader

4,218
24
47
70

answered Aug 13 '17 at 23:27

700L

31
2

score 2 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 06 '18 at 07:18

On the latest Raspbian Stitch (4.9.59-v7+), using unclutter seem the best way with simple options of relevant control. One thing I noticed is that using -idle 0 is a bad idea, and make the mouse flicker and overload the CPU. However, any number above 1s is good. The best option I found seem to be:

unclutter -display :0 -idle 3 -root -noevents

If you want this to start automatically, you have two add this line prefixed with an @ in one of two choices of where to put it:

/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart (recommended)
/etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE/autostart

Not sure what's the difference, but the LXDE-pi one is working.

How to disable mouse cursor on LXDE?

4 Answers4