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

[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.

[Penguin-Guru]

Got it. If I have time at some point, maybe I'll take a look around and see if I can help to translate that. My programming skills are pretty basic though and I'm not sure when I'd actually get to it. We'll see. 🙂

[Penguin-Guru]

It seems like uncluttered-xfixes does use Xlib and not XCB. It doesn't really matter though, since you're using XInput2. I've never used this library before but I just submitted a P.R. that seems to work. Please do confirm for yourself. 👍

[Airblader]

🙈 Sorry, it’s been a few years since I wrote this and I didn’t check. I’m about to leave for vacation but I’ll try to take a look at it before then. Thanks!