invisible mouse pointer?

["Drew Adams" <drew.adams@oracle.com>]

Is it possible to make the mouse pointer invisible (disappear)?

I don't mean by, say, setting its color to the frame's background color on all
characters of a buffer's text. I mean by, say, setting `x-pointer-shape' to a
value (e.g. nil?) that (somehow) causes the pointer to disappear.

I couldn't find anything about this, but it could be useful. Is there a good
workaround, if the feature doesn't exist?

One use could be to have an on-demand mouse: hide the pointer until you move the
mouse (then hide it again after a timeout period). In some ways (for some
people), that might be better than mouse-avoidance mode, which just gets the
pointer out of the way without making it disappear. I know some that some
applications have such a feature - PowerPoint comes to mind, but I think I've
seen it elsewhere also.

If this were implemented, it could be made available by setting
`x-pointer-shape' to some value, but then code would need to manage the
disappearance and re-appearance. Or `mouse-avoidance-mode' could perhaps have a
new value, `vanish', which would automatically manage the timeout etc.