Hiding the X cursor?

[Tyler McClung]

It seems I came in a little too late to reply on the old thread, but  
that's fine.

I'm attempting to (temporarily) hide the cursor in an embedded system  
running matchbox-window-manager.  I am able to hide the mouse for all  
newly opened windows, but old windows do not change.  I do not want to  
restart the wm for the changes to be global.  Here are the things I've  
tried:

1.  Apply an invisible mouse theme via matchbox-remote -theme
Fail: Did not change anything

2.  Configure/change default icon file to point to xcursor-transparent
Fail:  Works for new windows + root, but not for old windows (works if  
wm is restarted)

3.  Send events to matchbox-window-manager by rewriting the source  
code for the wm as well as matchbox-remote.
Fail:  Does the same thing as attempt 2.

I believe the reason why 2 and 3 do not work is matchbox or X  
maintains a cache of the applied cursors for each window that is open  
and does not mess with the cache for windows that are already open.  I  
am unsure if this is how it really works, but I am having trouble  
changing the old windows.

Is there a way to hide the cursor on the fly without restarting the  
server or window manager?

If you're wondering why, I'm attempting to write a little program to  
toggle the view of the cursor on the system because the user may want  
to use the touchscreen, the touchpad, or a mouse; plus some programs  
would be cooler without the cursor.


Thanks in advance,
-- 
Tyler McClung
mcclunty at onid.orst.edu