How to hide a turtle icon/pointer in Python

Question

When using Python Turtle, how do you hide turtle icon(s)/pointer(s) in turtle graphics in Turtle code so that it won't show when testing?

Mortal

Answer 1

The documentation has a section on Visibility:

turtle.hideturtle()
turtle.ht()
Make the turtle invisible. It’s a good idea to do this while you’re in the middle of doing some complex drawing, because hiding the turtle speeds up the drawing observably.

>>> turtle.hideturtle()

Also, you can un-hide the turtle:

turtle.showturtle()
turtle.st()
Make the turtle visible.

>>> turtle.showturtle()

You can also query its visibilty:

turtle.isvisible()
Return True if the Turtle is shown, False if it’s hidden.

>>> turtle.hideturtle()
>>> turtle.isvisible()
False
>>> turtle.showturtle()
>>> turtle.isvisible()
True

Exorbitant

Answer 2

One more practical method that the other answer failed to address is to set the visible keyword argument to False when defining the Turtle object:

import turtle

my_turtle = turtle.Turtle(visible=False)

Of course, that is for when you want the Turtle to be invisible from the very beginning of the program.

When you define a Turtle object without setting visible to False, there will always be a lightning short moment where the turtle is still visible:

---

import turtle

my_turtle = turtle.Turtle()
# The Turtle may be visible before the program reaches the line under, depending on the speed of your computer 
my_turtle.hideturtle()

With the visible keyword argument set to False, you can always call my_turtle.showturtle() and my_turtle.hideturtle() in your code where ever the Turtle needs to be visible and hidden again.

---

Here are all the default turtle settings that you can customize (the settings of interest here are the ones commented with the # RawTurtle):

_CFG = {"width" : 0.5,               # Screen
        "height" : 0.75,
        "canvwidth" : 400,
        "canvheight": 300,
        "leftright": None,
        "topbottom": None,
        "mode": "standard",          # TurtleScreen
        "colormode": 1.0,
        "delay": 10,
        "undobuffersize": 1000,      # RawTurtle
        "shape": "classic",
        "pencolor" : "black",
        "fillcolor" : "black",
        "resizemode" : "noresize",
        "visible" : True,
        "language": "english",        # docstrings
        "exampleturtle": "turtle",
        "examplescreen": "screen",
        "title": "Python Turtle Graphics",
        "using_IDLE": False
       }

---

Update: I just noticed that cdlane's comment on the other answer pointed out this method, but comments are temporary.

Quintie