How to Hide the Mouse Cursor on Mac If It Doesn’t Go Away
When I watch videos on my Mac, I like the experience to be as immersive as possible. I don’t want to see notifications, the menu bar, or even the mouse cursor. It’s fairly easy to put your Mac into Do Not Disturb mode and watch videos in full screen, which solves the first two problems, but the third is a little trickier. Sometimes the mouse cursor just refuses to disappear from my Mac screen, either because the cursor is on the play button or because it’s just glitchy. Luckily, there are several ways to hide the mouse cursor on your Mac every time, so you can get back to watching shows, movies, and YouTube videos with peace of mind.
Place the cursor in an unobtrusive location
This is the most obvious way to deal with an incorrect mouse cursor. When you’re watching a video in full screen, place your cursor anywhere in the video (outside the playback controls, mind you) and it should disappear. This has worked for me almost always, but when it doesn’t it’s very 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 doesn’t go away, it doesn’t block much of my video.
However, we should not settle for this. If you want the cursor to disappear 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 hide your mouse cursor? There are actually several 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 use some of these keyboard shortcuts. Here’s a short list of shortcuts that make the cursor disappear on your Mac:
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Press any key : Yes, really. Almost all the keys on your Mac’s keyboard can cause the cursor to disappear 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 some buttons like Caps Lock, but in most cases the cursor disappears. The list of keys varies greatly, since the key may be a shortcut in the application you are using. For example: YouTube uses K for play/pause.
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F8 or F9 : You can try moving the cursor once to see where it is and then press F8 or F9. Some people may need to press fn+F8 or fn+F9 . The cursor should disappear after about a second.
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Team-. : Command-full stop also causes the cursor to disappear on some Macs. It doesn’t work on my Mac because 1Password took over this shortcut, but this shortcut seems to work for a lot 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, try Cursorcerer . Once downloaded, simply double click the downloaded file and Cursorcerer should be installed. It will appear in macOS System Preferences as the last entry in the left pane. You can use this to set up a global hotkey to hide or show the mouse cursor on your Mac. The default is Option-Control-K . By default, the cursor will reappear when you move the mouse. However, on the same settings page you can also automatically hide the cursor after a set period of inactivity and turn off the cursor when you move the mouse.
In short, you can use Cursorcerer to completely hide your mouse cursor if you want. If you do this, the cursor will only be displayed using the keyboard shortcut. I don’t recommend going this route at all. Ideally, you’ll 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 visibility of the cursor. This way, you can easily find the cursor even if you forget the keyboard shortcut. You might also want to leave everything as is and rely only on the shortcut to hide the cursor.