Auto-Hide Your Mouse Pointer with Unclutter

The purpose of Unclutter is very simply.  From the man page:

unclutter removes the cursor image from the screen so that it does not obstruct the area you are looking at after it has not moved for a given time.

Not anything too complicated about that.  Now lets get it installed!  Installation can be done by issuing the following command or clicking the link.

sudo aptitude install unclutter

Now that we have it installed the one last thing we’ll need to do is configure it and have it automagically start at boot time.  We’ll do this by way of “System > Preferences > Sessions”

The “sessions” for your Desktop controls what applications and services are auto-started when you login.  This way unclutter will start up automatically.  You’ll want to click “Add” and populate the three fields.  For name “Unclutter” should be fine.  For the command field you’ll want something like:

unclutter -display :0.0 -idle 5

And you can populate the comment with whatever you like.  I used “Remove the cursor image after mouse inactivity.”

You can find more options in the man page (man unclutter), but this should basically hide the mouse pointer after 5 seconds of inactivity on your default display.