Relevant bug report: 465119 – Option to hide mouse cursor after inactivity
I’m happy to chip in at least €20, up to €50.
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Or if I can pay in multiple payments, I’d be willing to up the amount to at least €100, maybe more.
Btw, note that I’m talking about an optional feature. So I’m NOT requesting for the cursor to hide itself by default, which would confuse many users. I’m talking about an option to enable hiding after inactivity for those who want it (including me), so that I don’t see the cursor until I move the mouse, like unclutter on X.
In System Settings would be the best place to put it, but hidden behind a cli switch would be fine by me as well. As long as it gets implemented and can be enabled, I don’t really mind if it’s a GUI implementation or not.
Should be quite easy to do, if by “inactivity” you mean only mouse activity. i.e. not including keyboard, touchpad, etc. It should be implemented as a KWin Effect, which you enable (and configure duration of inactivity) in System Settings.
But from the bug report you linked, it seems kwin devs might not accept such thing as a built-in effect in KWin. Then, we have to distribute it separately (e.g. in store.kde.org). And since it will be a C++ effect, it needs to be rebuilt with each new Plasma release.
If you are OK with this possibility, then I can do it. And instead of payment, you can donate to kde.org.
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Thanks for your offer!
I mean that the cursor automatically hides when the mouse isn’t touched or when you start typing. If the latter is not possible, then at least the first would be great.
I know they have said they didn’t want to include it because they wrongly think it’s too niche, which is why I opened a bounty to see if that would help change their minds.
But if you could write a script that worked like that, I’d be happy with that too. 
And I’ll happily donate to KDE then (as I have done before, but this time a bigger amount).
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What KDE Plasma version are you using?
I’m currently using 5.27, but as I am on openSUSE Tumbleweed, 6.0 will hit next month.
I’ve done it on KDE 6.0 RC1:
Unfortunately, I don’t have an environment to port it to 5.27. So probably you have to wait for the KDE Neon 6.0RC1 image to have a test drive.
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A little teaser of how it looks like:
(Sorry, can’t directly capture the screen, as Spectacle isn’t recording mouse visibility correctly.)
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I see there has been movement on the feature.
but how do i use it?
It will be in Plasma 6.1.
Or you can build the code in the link above yourself.
No, we agreed that he will donate to KDE instead.
OK cool, thanks!
Will it work on both Xorg and Wayland?
Unfortunately, no. It only works in Wayland.
According to kwin maintainers, the keyboard-spying kwin internal API it uses is somehow only available in Wayland. I don’t know why it is so.
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