Yes, I am still alive, despite the appearances. Hello!
Anyway, I'm working on a kiosk-like device now. I solved all the common fullscreen all the things, prevent Alt+F4 and similar nonsense. I am, however, stuck on hiding and showing the cursor. Now, obviously as it is with these things, the cursor should be hidden by default. I'm accomplishing this by adding -nocursor
switch to X server start command. Works fine, no problems.
However, there will also be a "service mode" USB with a configuration app on it that will launch when an approved USB drive is plugged in. One of the features of it will have is touchscreen calibration (because touchscreens are weird and may be totally misconfigured by default). So, it would be nice if the technician using the app could use a mouse until the screen is calibrated (there also might be multiple screens connected to it with only the primary one having a touchscreen, so). Which brings up a problem of there being no cursor for them to see while using the mouse.
I found some weird hacky applications that accomplish this but they all seem wonky and not really what I need. Technically, I could restart X when the stick is plugged in, but I'm trying to avoid that.
I know that you can set the cursor to be hidden over a specific window when using X libraries in your own applications, but does anyone know if there's a way to force that on/off for all windows using calls to xinput
or XCB stuff from shell or something so I could do it on the fly?