When I’m watching a video on my Mac, I want to keep the experience as immersive as possible. I don’t want to see notifications, the menu bar, or even the mouse cursor. It’s pretty easy to put your Mac on Do Not Disturb and watch videos in full screen, which solves the first two problems, but the third is a bit of a pain. Sometimes the mouse cursor just refuses to leave my Mac’s screen, either because it’s stuck on a play button or because it’s just plain buggy. Luckily, there are a few ways to hide the mouse cursor on your Mac every time, so you can watch TV shows, movies, and YouTube videos in peace again.

This is the most obvious way to deal with a stray mouse cursor. When you’re watching a video in full screen, move the cursor anywhere on the video (outside of the playback controls, mind you) and it should disappear. This has almost always worked for me, but when it doesn’t it’s pretty 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 shouldn’t settle for this. If you want your cursor to be gone 100% of the time, try one of these tricks:

Did you know that you can use keyboard shortcuts to make your mouse cursor disappear? There are actually several options here and you may have to try a few to find one that works for you, as you may have apps installed that take over some of those shortcuts. Here’s a short list of keyboard shortcuts that will make the cursor disappear on your Mac: