Unclutter hides the mouse pointer when you haven’t used the mouse for 5 seconds. Although this is different from the Mac approach, it actually works fine for me. When the pointer is hidden you can type and read and when you move you mouse then the pointer is shown again.

According to the man pages it should be possible to let unclutter hide the pointer when you press (or release) a key, but I couldn’t get that to work.

Installation is easy, it’s in the Ubuntu repos:

sudo apt-get install unclutter

And start it:

unclutter & disown

If you want to start unclutter when you login you can add it to your session:

Open Sessions, click “Add”, type some name (“Unclutter”), command (“unclutter”) and comment (“Hide mouse pointer”) and that’s it.