On 2025-04-03 Gilbert Detillieux wrote:
Hi folks.
I'm trying to find something equivalent to "unclutter" or "xbanish" that will allow me to hide the mouse cursor when I'm running Wayland's labwc compositor. This is for a kiosk-mode application, using a Raspberry Pi and Debian 12 (Bookworm).
I would think that this would be a feature that would have to be provided by the compositor. One of the main ideas behind Wayland is to "protect" the desktop against programs doing anything beyond their own limited control space (i.e. a window). So using a 3rd program to cause changes in the 1st program, or Wayland itself, is probably impossible.
Doing global stuff to mouse cursors would seem to fit the bill of prohibited actions.
I could be wrong, this is just going by my years of research into getting the functionality I get with sawfish WM out of Wayland, should TPTB at RH/Fedora decide to ditch Xorg completely. And the main thing I've learned is everything "global" in nature, or "outside the window" (even frame decoration behavior!), must be done in the compositor.
There is another avenue of attack, though. The program should have control of the cursor within its own window. So if you had, say, a full-screened kiosk GUI app running, presumably that app could hide the cursor (like terminals do when typing). So perhaps you can look to using a program that can be set to hide the cursor, or modify an open source program to add that feature.
(Disclaimer: all of the above is mere conjecture! I don't use awful, dumb, useless, regressive, forced-change, adds-nothing-I-care-about, should-be-killed Wayland; and long may I postpone that day!)