Aggressively Hiding the Cursor — Hi, I’m Sam

Aggressively Hiding the Cursor — Hi, I’m Sam

Hi, I’m Sam

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Aggressively Hiding the Cursor

Posted on July 5, 2017

I’m working on a Mac app that has a color picker in it. Here’s a screenshot:

For this to work, I hide the cursor and have a custom view track your mouse movements. (When I say cursor I mean the pointer on screen you control with your mouse, and when I say mouse I mean your physical input device.) I use a full screen, borderless window and NSTrackingArea to do this. Nothing too crazy there. I do this to avoid dealing with custom a NSCursor since that was a lot more work.

When I show this fullscreen window, I simply call NSCursor.hide() and call NSCursor.unhide() when the window gets dismissed or loses focus. Easy enough.

Here’s the catch. If you violently move your mouse the cursor would come back. This took me awhile to figure out. If the system makes your cursor giant then it comes back. You never actually see it get giant though. This kinda seems like a bug. I know using NSCursor hide and unhide isn’t super reliable unless you control everything. I though having a full screen window was enough control. Oh well.

There was a simple solution though:

override func mouseMoved(with event: NSEvent) {
    // Whatever work I would normally do here

    // Workaround macOS making the cursor huge and unhiding it when you wiggle it violently
    NSCursor.hide()
}

Easy enough. Maybe I should use a custom cursor instead of this craziness?