Slashdot Mirror
X With No Mouse Cursor
innocent_white_lamb writes "I am using an X-based menu that doesn't recognize a mouse. Keyboard input only. I load the menu with the command "startx -e menu", which loads the menu and gets stuff going without any need for a window manager. The problem is that the mouse cursor sits in the middle of the screen and, without a mouse attached, there appears to be no way to move it or get rid of it. I've asked around and nobody seems to have run into this situation before. So my question is, how do you get rid of the mouse cursor under X without using a window manager?"
Make a cursor theme that makes the cursor invisible or a single pixel or something. That's the easy way. And you're fired.
Set the X/Y init position somewhere off the screen and recompile.
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
unclutter does the job for you
then choose a cursor that's blank as the default. Or substitute a cursor font that's nothing but blanks.
You can move the cursor by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Num Lock and then using the numpad. You move the cursor with the keys around 5, click with 5, etc. A quick googling brought up this webpage.
that uses XWarpPointer[sic] to move the pointer wherever on boot.
Photos.
So my question is, how do you get rid of the mouse cursor under X without using a window manager?
Get a cat cursor to chase it away!
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
innocent_white_lamb writes "I am using an X-based menu that doesn't recognize a mouse. Keyboard input only. He can't "just plug in a mouse". RTFA
This is my
What happened to choice is what makes Open Source/ Free Software/ Linux so great?
Maybe you meant to say, choice makes it great as long as you use it in one of our approved ways.
A big fuck you to everyone who tries to rewrite someone's problem instead of helping them solve it. Great community.
Can't you go into /etc/X11/XF86Config (or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) and comment out all the lines
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse1"
blah blah blah
EndSection
I think that might do it.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
void XvVideoOutput::hide_cursor(void)
{
Cursor no_ptr;
Pixmap bm_no;
XColor black, dummy;
Colormap colormap;
static char no_data[] = { 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 };
colormap = DefaultColormap(XJ_disp, DefaultScreen(XJ_disp));
XAllocNamedColor(XJ_disp, colormap, "black", &black, &dummy);
bm_no = XCreateBitmapFromData(XJ_disp, XJ_win, no_data, 8, 8);
no_ptr = XCreatePixmapCursor(XJ_disp, bm_no, bm_no, &black, &black, 0, 0);
XDefineCursor(XJ_disp, XJ_win, no_ptr);
XFreeCursor(XJ_disp, no_ptr);
}
First of all, hit ctrl-shift-numlock. Then you can use the numeric keypad to move the mouse cursor (probably to the lower right where it is not visible). Second of all, you might be able to find a way to change the cursor pixmap/bitmap to be transparent. It can be done via an X API call, but I don't know if there are any command line utilities that will do it for you. -- Bob
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
whenever GDM crashes
[/joke]
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
For the record, e^(i*pi)=cos(i*pi)+isin(i*pi) =-1+0 =-1 so e^(i*pi)+1=0... so why are you giving us zero cents? :)
I was just joking. But if you want to get technical... The article doesn't say that the system doesn't support the mouse, only that the menu doesn't.
As in there is no need for a window manager because the system is dedicated to a single purpose. My guess is running the menu. That doesn't support a mouse.
So he asks himself, "why connect a mouse if the application on my single-purpose computer doesn't even use one?" So then he doesn't. And then there's the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen. So he posts an article on Slashdot. On the same page so far?
At no point does not system not support a mouse. Your reply makes no sense. Flame away if you don't see the humor, but please try to make sense.
Now type:
This changes the root cursor to the empty bitmap you just created.Instead of "startx -e menu" write a shell script with two lines:
Have "startx" execute this script, or simply make this script yourProblem solved.
However, if the "menu" program you speak of does not simply inherit the root window's cursor (default behaviour), you will need either to modify the program to do so (eg, comment out the cursor-setting lines, grep for XSetWindowAttributes or XDefineCursor), or to modify your cursor font so the cursor it uses is the blank one you created. If the program creates its own cursor rather than using a standard cursor from the cursor font, you need to modify the source. It's probably much easier to modify the source anyway, since it only takes a grep and a recompile, whereas if you want to modify your cursor font, you have to find some font editing program and deal with someone's idea of a usable graphical interface.
If you don't have source to your program, you'll need to break out the hex editor. If this is the case and you don't know i386 asm, post a URL to the program.
Just check the mplayer sources.
I don't know if what mplayer does is pure X stuff or if it talks window manager into hiding mouse cursor. But when you move mouse cursor into mplayer video window it disapears after a while.
Just check the sources and see if you can implement the same in your menu program. But beware, mplayer is GPL so if you use this code directly you would have to license your program GPL too.
You can of course check what it is doing and reimplement it.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
#define nn1_width 16
#define nn1_height 16
static unsigned char nn1_bits[] = {
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,
0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00};
xsetroot -cursor emptycursor emptycursor
Why go to all that trouble using the trig expansion you can do this directly. pi radians on the unit circle is the point (-1,0) ~ -1 + 0i....
A long time ago, at a time in my life when I had more money than brains, I bought myself a Fat Mac with 512K memory and two floppy disk drives the day this model first hit the streets in Toronto.
My girlfriend at the time (I guess there is an upside to having more money than brains) needed to conduct an experiment in cognitive psychogology to complete her undergraduate philosophy degree.
She decided to conduct an experiment in reading comprehension. Both groups were asked to read the text, but with different reading instructions. One group was instructed to proofread the text, the other group was instructed to read for comprehension.
We decided that programming this experiment for my new Mac would automate the timing controls, automatically measure the proofing reading results (how many words were marked with a mouse click), to collect the multiple choice results, and record the text of a written response question (in a dialog box roughly as feeble and distigusting as the web form input box used to compose posts for slashdot twenty years later).
When I showed her the first version, her remark was this, "you have to remove the menu bar or I'll fail". I could see her point. For an experiment in reading comprehension you want to control every word of text presented to the subject. Her professor would see it the same way.
At this point I should have pulled out a roll of duct tape, sliced off a half inch think strip, and covered over the top half inch of the display.
But ego prevailed. Surely, I thought, I just need to read the big Apple developer guide phone book thing to find the right flag to the right system call to remove the menu bar.
Thus began three weeks in hell.
The only way I could find to suppress the menu bar was to skip the initial call to some of the Apple windowing subsystems. It seemed to work. But then my program began to crash in dozens of mysterious and different ways. Eventually I learned that the call I had skipped initialized data structures required by many other subsystems.
Then I found other system calls that would hide the menu bar temporarily. But the nasty thing would reappear randomly as the user performed mouse actions. No matter what I tried, the cat came back.
Within a few months I several other frustrating encounters with the Mac architecture. I grew to despise the architecture of the Mac windowing system. I thought I could escape from Pascal hell by installing the Aztec C compiler. I was instantly much happier, but it wasn't a productive situation because the underlying C to Pascal mapping was full of bugs.
Then I was forced to buy an 8MHz PC for a programming contract. I put the hideously Fat Mac into a closet and I can barely recall using it since. I made one effort to salvage my investment by inquiring about the cost of a making a modification to install an internal hard drive, but the price was outrageous (almost as much as the entire turbo PC I bought instead).
Thanks to Apple, I learned a extremely valuable lesson about decoupling policy from implementation. One man's policy (Steve's) is another man's hell (mine).
Twenty years later, I never complain about X Windows. At least I know that this of kind of question *can* be answered.
Gawd I hated that machine. And it turned out the girlfriend wasn't much better.
You could XWarpCursor it to a position off the screen.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
quite a relevant anecdote actually...
Wouldn't it be:
|1|=|-1|; 1=1
?
Just curious how you got -1^2 = -1.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Well it's sqrt(1) = +/- 1. And that is the error.
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
But...but...square roots are always positive!
/me self destructs in a cloud of high school algebra II
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
It can be done. Obviously.
If, god forbid, you ever find yourself playing with an old mac again, this may be of some use:
There is a system-wide global variable which holds the menu bar height on 68K macs and maps to $0BAA, part of the non-volatile PRAM. It determines how many scanlines the menu bar will occupy on screen.
Unfortunately it is not as simple as setting this to zero (like the toolbox calls does). Although the menu manager will not draw beyond that line, the window manager is not aware that is it allowed to draw where the menu bar used to be. The dirty solution is to just union the old menu rect with the desktop "GrayRgn" (Of course this doesn't preserve those "cute" rounded screen edges. Ugh.)
After that, you'll need to fire off a paint event to every window on the screen. (Although a paintone/paintbehind event pair to the foreground window will work just as well.)
*sigh* What useless knowledge...
=)
Paul Lenhart writes words!