Remove (hide) mouse cursor when idle on Rasbperry Pi OS Bookworm

Question

There are many similar questions (e. g. here, and on the forums), but all the answers are outdated - they are for xserver, lightdm, lxde etc., and not for Bookworm/Wayland.

So, how can we hide the mouse cursor in the latest Bookworm RPi OS? unclutter from apt doesn't work, it does nothing (the cursor never hides).

Answer 1

wayfire itself doesn't come with this feature bundled, but can be easily extended through its complementary wayfire-plugins-extra package. Unfortunately, it is not available in the Bookworm repos.

I (very) recently had a similar requirement for a project and came up with a solution. You can find my full entry here. I'll pick what is relevant for your question:

Hide mouse pointer

1) Install wayfire-plugins-extra

Compiled Library:

1. Download the correct library for your architecture from here (Compiled by me. Feel free to build from source)
2. Decompress with tar xf /path/to/wayfire-plugins-extra-raspbian-<your-arch>.tar.xz
3. Each plugin comes with .so and .xml files. You will need to copy those to their correct paths:
   sudo cp <desired-plugin>.so /usr/lib/<your-arch-linux-gnu>/wayfire/<desired-plugin>.so
sudo cp <desired-plugin>.xml /usr/share/wayfire/metadata/<desired-plugin>.xml

Build from Source:

1. Follow the instructions in https://github.com/seffs/wayfire-plugins-extra/. Install all required dev packages with
   sudo apt install libglibmm-2.4-dev libglm-dev libxml2-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev wayfire-dev libwlroots-dev libwf-config-dev meson ninja-build
2. Each plugin comes with .so and .xml files. meson should take care of the installation. Otherwise check if the following path exists for any new extra plugin:
   ls /usr/lib/<your-arch-linux-gnu>/wayfire/<new-extra-plugin>.so
ls /usr/share/wayfire/metadata/<new-extra-plugin>.xml

2) Activate your plugin(s)

I was only interested in hiding the mouse pointer. This can be accomplished with the hide_cursor plugin. The same concept applies to the rest of plugins.

Open your ~/.config/wayfire.init file and adjust the following:

[core]
plugins = \
        autostart \
        ### We need to add the extra plugin to the list ###
        hide-cursor

Launch wayfire once again. You'll notice that the mouse pointer disappeared.

Answer 2

I've had success with installing the hideaway plugin for Interception Tools using the script below.

Adapted from https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=358285#p2176499

#!/bin/bash
# hide mouse in wayland raspbian

sudo apt install -y interception-tools interception-tools-compat
sudo apt install -y cmake
cd ~
git clone https://gitlab.com/interception/linux/plugins/hideaway.git
cd hideaway
cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build
sudo cp /home/$USER/hideaway/build/hideaway /usr/bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/hideaway

cd ~
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ugotapi/wayland-pagepi/main/config.yaml
sudo cp /home/$USER/config.yaml /etc/interception/udevmon.d/config.yaml
sudo systemctl restart udevmon