How to hide cursor in a Swing application?

Question

Is there a way to hide cursor (other than using transparent image as a cursor)?

I want to hide the cursor, when the user point the mouse outside JPanel in JFrame.

Answer 1

It appears that the Cursor class does not have a "blank" cursor to begin with, so one could define a new "blank" cursor using the Toolkit.createCustomCursor method.

Here's one way I've tried which seems to work:

// Transparent 16 x 16 pixel cursor image.
BufferedImage cursorImg = new BufferedImage(16, 16, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);

// Create a new blank cursor.
Cursor blankCursor = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createCustomCursor(
    cursorImg, new Point(0, 0), "blank cursor");

// Set the blank cursor to the JFrame.
mainJFrame.getContentPane().setCursor(blankCursor);

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Edit

Regarding the comment about everything inside the JFrame ending up without a cursor, it seems that the Components which are contained in the JFrame will end up inheriting the cursor of the container (the JFrame), so if it is a requirement to have a certain Component have the cursor appear, one would have to manually set the desired cursor.

For example, if there is a JPanel contained in the JFrame, then one could set the cursor of that JPanel to the system's default using the Cursor.getDefaultCursor method:

JPanel p = ...
// Sets the JPanel's cursor to the system default.
p.setCursor(Cursor.getDefaultCursor());