gnome-terminal hides mouse pointer

[Max Waterman]

This is a problem when using gnome-terminal with focus-follow-mouse, which is somewhat unusual.

It seems like gnome-terminal has a feature where it attempts to declutter the screen by hiding the mouse pointer when it thinks it has focus.

This seems to work ok under normal circumstances, but sometimes it seems to not make the cursor visible again when it loses focus.

Here is an example of the situation I'm talking about :

(pointer means mouse pointer)

0) install unity tweak tool and use the Window Manager/Additional/Focus mode option to set 'focus mode' as 'mouse', and 'auto-raise' to 'off'
1) open a terminal
2) open chrome
3) move pointer over chrome and type
  chrome accepts input
  terminal doesn't and have cursor non-solid
4) move pointer over terminal and type
  chrome defocuses and doesn't accept input
  terminal accepts input, cursor turns solid, and pointer disappears
5) type alt-tab to send focus back to chrome and type

It is at this point that things can go wrong.

The 'correct' behaviour :
  chrome has focus and accepts input
  terminal doesn't accept input, cursor turns non-solid and pointer re-appears

However, when things 'go wrong' :
  chrome has focus and accepts input
  terminal doesn't accept input, cursor *remains solid* and pointer *remains hidden*

This leads to the situation where the user decides to change focus again (pointer is hidden on top of terminal) but can't see where the pointer is, and he/she moves the mouse around franticly trying to make it appear again and/or see where it is (it can be difficult to see under normal circumstances when it isn't moving).

My initial instinct is that there should be an option to stop the hiding of the cursor, but while filing this bug, everything was working pretty well, so perhaps this is actually bug and it should just be fixed.

I will attempt to pay closer attention to the situation leading up to the problem and add comments here if I find anything. I notice other people having trouble on ubuntu forums, though I suspect they're not using focus-follows-mouse or have click-to-raise disabled, so perhaps those aspects are 'red herrings' :

<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2312008&page=2>

Description: Ubuntu 15.10
ii gnome-terminal 3.16.2-1ubun amd64 GNOME terminal emulator applicati
3.16.2-1ubuntu4

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

This should be fixed in Xenial 16.04, see

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=725342
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=677329

(although we haven't verified with focus-follows-mouse mode).