[Linux] Effective Yolomouse Alternative UPDATED

Intro ramblings:
Earlier this year I smashed my head against the wall that is getting an effective yolomouse alternative working for PoE under wine.

When i eventually threw in the towel I had some semblance of a working replacement BUT it tore the games performance a new *cough* breach. With the compositor running the games fps counter was fine, but my eyes were seeing 5-10 frames a sec. With it off the games frames hung around 15 dipping as low as 12.

But with this new renderer i figured it was worth retracing my steps and seeing if its made any difference. Its perfect, no performance drop at all.

Now this is a bit hodgepodge so im sure someone will refine the advise or write up a more elegant tool themselves, but this works absolutely fine for me.

What I'm using:
swcursor (https://github.com/andykitchen/swcursor not my code, just something i found when looking for examples of software cursors)
unclutter (not necessary, using it to hide the games cursor, its in your package manager)
your cursor as an image (png) with a transparent background eg:


This is a software cursor so if you are not running a compositor you'll need to or you'll be left with more of a square than a cursor. (Whats a compositor? its the program that gives your window manager the ability to have transparent windows, drop shadows and other fancy effects and animations. If your desktop has fancy bells and whistles like that you are already running one.)
I am using picom. (again its in your package manager)

How to:
Clone the swcursor repo and make.
Dont know how to clone or make?
Dont build and run random code from people on the internet!
That being said once this is confirmed to be safe and working by people you trust:
make a directory somewhere you'd like to keep this
go to that directory in your terminal and run "git clone https://github.com/andykitchen/swcursor.git" OR of you dont have git, download and extract this
Enter the swcursor or swcursor-master directory in your terminal, you should see a makefile in the dir
run the command 'make', you may need to install gtk3, gdk and xlib from your package manager first.
there is now a 'swcursor' executable in the directory.

when you want to yolo your cursor:
run "swcursor your_cursor.png"
run your compositor if it aint already running

and you're laughing.

To hide the games cursor see the script i use below.
https://pastebin.com/UAJ8X3bd

"

#!/bin/bash

# kills processes when you kill the script
trap "exit" INT TERM
trap "kill 0" EXIT

# Starts the SW cursor
/path/to/swcurosr /path/to/your/curosr/image.png &

# Uncomment of not already running a compositor and you have picom installed
# picom &

# Uncomment this line to hide the cursor, this is ugly but works, it kills and launches unclutter every .15 seconds
# this is because mouse clicks will keep unhiding it
#while true; do unclutter --timeout 0 --jitter 4000 & last_pid=$!;sleep .15;kill -TERM $last_pid 2> /dev/null;done

wait $!

Drawbacks:
The only one i can think of is... If you dont hide the games cursor youll be able to see this clearly.. If you move the mouse slowly across the screen you notice that the SW cursor lags a bit behind the games cursor. This is a characteristic of software cursors though someone might be able to make a more accurate implementation.
It really isnt that bad though, youll notice quicker than you can even register, the moment you stop moving the mouse the SW cursor will catch up. To demonstrate this quickly snap the mouse from one side of the screen to the other, stopping the cursor and looking at it before each move. Its neigh impossible to catch the SW cursor out of place.

So in a nutshell, its less accurate than the hardware cursor yolomouse provides, but its absolutely usable.

Outro Ramblings:
someone could look to things like
https://github.com/Airblader/unclutter-xfixes
https://github.com/aktau/hhpc
for an example of how the cursor is hidden and add it to swcurosr or their own software cursor tool. The drawback of these tools as is, is that they are designed to hide the cursor when not in use, and show it when it is. So the ideal tool would hide the HW cursor indefinitely, until the tool was closed.

Other possibilities are mixing in some xdotool to the script to auto load and unload the SW/HW cursors as PoE gains and loses focus (though i recall wine focus being a pain). Ill likely have a compulsion to do this much at some point.

Edit: Oh yes, not sure where the best place to put this is, the "Help and Information" and "Technical Support" seem to be inundated with a slew of queries. So I made this thread here, if there is somewhere better please do share. I seldom use the forums for much more than build guides/inspiration.

Edit2: buzzwords for SEO, proton lutris mouse cursor override