How to Hide Your Mac’s Mouse Cursor When It Won’t Go Away

When I'm watching a video on my Mac, I like to keep the experience as immersive as possible. I don't want to see notifications, the menu bar, or even the mouse cursor. It's pretty easy to put your Mac on Do Not Disturb and watch videos in full screen, which takes care of the first two problems, but the third one is a bit tricky. Sometimes, the mouse cursor simply refuses to disappear from my Mac's screen, either because the cursor is on a playback button, or because it's just buggy. Luckily, there are a few ways to hide the mouse cursor on your Mac every time, so you can get back to watching shows, movies, and YouTube videos in peace. 

Place the cursor somewhere unobtrusive

This is the most obvious way to deal with an errant mouse cursor. When you're watching a video in full-screen, place the cursor anywhere on the video (outside of the playback controls, mind you) and it should disappear. This has worked for me almost all the time, but when it doesn't it's quite annoying. It's gotten to the point where I usually move the cursor to the far right edge of the screen, so even if it fails to go away, it's not blocking much of my video.

Still, we shouldn't have to settle for this. If you want your cursor gone 100% of the time, try one of these tricks instead:

Press a key on your Mac's keyboard

Did you know you can use keyboard shortcuts to make your mouse cursor go away? There are actually multiple options here, and you may have to try a few to find one that works on your end, since you may have installed apps that have taken over some of those keyboard shortcuts. Here's a quick list of shortcuts that make the cursor disappear on your Mac:

• Press any key: Yes, really. Almost all keys on your Mac's keyboard can make the cursor disappear when in full-screen mode. Try this: move your cursor anywhere on the screen and press any key on your keyboard. The cursor should disappear after a second or two. It doesn't work with a few buttons such as Caps Lock, but in most cases, the cursor does disappear. The list of keys varies quite a bit because the key may be a shortcut in the app you're using. Eg: YouTube uses K for play/pause.

• F8 or F9: You can try moving the cursor once to see where it is, and then press either F8 or F9. Some people may have to press fn+F8 or fn+F9. The cursor should disappear in about a second.

• Command-.: The Command-full stop shortcut also makes the cursor disappear on some Macs. It doesn't work on my Mac because 1Password has taken over that shortcut, but this shortcut does appear to work for lots of people.

Use Cursorcerer to hide the mouse cursor on your Mac

If you want more control over the visibility of your Mac's mouse cursor, check out Cursorcerer. Once you've downloaded it, just double-click the downloaded file and Cursorcerer should be installed. It will appear under macOS' System Settings, as the last entry in the left pane. You can use that to configure a global hotkey for hiding or revealing the mouse cursor on your Mac. The default is Option-Control-K. By default, the cursor will reappear when you move your mouse. However, the same settings page also lets you hide the cursor automatically after a set time limit of inactivity, and lets you disable revealing the cursor when you move the mouse.

In short, you can use Cursorcerer to completely hide the mouse cursor if you want to. If you do this, only the keyboard shortcut will reveal the cursor. I don't recommend going that way at all. Ideally, you want to set a reasonable delay timer (say 15 seconds or so) before the cursor is hidden and have a keyboard shortcut to toggle the cursor's visibility. This way, you can easily find the cursor even if you forget the keyboard shortcut. You may just want to leave things as-is, too, and only rely on the shortcut to hide your cursor.