Show position of pointer

Question

There's an option for Ubuntu's mouse that says 'Show position of the mouse when the Control key is pressed.'. This function is required permanently enabled for a certain script I run, but on the other side it makes Blender 'Control' key not to work (as in Ctrl+Z, which is annoying) nor in some other apps (like the game Limbo). So, how can I solve this problem?

There are three solutions I can think of, but I don't know how to implement any of them.

• Change the key being clicked. If I could show mouse position with, say, Tab, that'd be perfectly fine.
• To show the mouse with a script. THIS would be the best actually (currently I'm using xte to emulate the Ctrl key pressing). Running something like show-mouse in a terminal would be great. Couldn't find anything through google though.
• Make these programs to recognize the Control pressing apart of gnome/ubuntu. This is probably a bug so this should be the hardest way to solve. EDIT
• There is another option worth considering, I can send a gnome notification so it's displayed when I touch the screen on the main screen instead of around the mouse. However, it displays for a really long time, which is a known bug. It's worth considering in case it is solved.

Thank you so much!

PS, the solutions here didn't work for me.

Ubuntu 12.04

Answer 1

You can use:

xdotool getmouselocation

to get the current mouse position. Then you can find ways to draw something at the mouse position.

Example usage using xwinwrap and ImageMagick, which displays 1.png for 3 seconds, but you may need to change some configurations of your window manager to make it work:

xwinwrap -g 100x100+$(xdotool getmouselocation|sed -r 's/^x:([0-9]+) y:([0-9]+) .*$/print \1-50;"+";\2-50/'|bc) -ni -a -st -sp -nf -o 0.5 -sh circle -- bash -c 'display -window $0 1.png;sleep 3s' WID