I've started using Krita for blackboarding sessions, both recorded Khan Academy style videos, and for live meetings. My use case is about 85% freehand written text and 15% rudimentary line diagrams using a wacom tablet. This leads me to a few of minor annoyances or desires:

1. When you are writing with a pen, the cursor "sonar" circle is constantly flashing making writing distracting. In the cursor settings there's no way to turn this "find cursor" ring off, regardless of which cursor is selected. Anyone know of a way to turn those off?

2. I uses the same 10-15 brightly colored inks for blackboarding, is there a way to show a minimalist palette of paint swatches that isn't always 10 swatches wide? Like a column of swatches one swatch wide would work great for me.

3. Is it possible to edit down the toolbar? I only use 4-5 tools and don't need the full tool set.

Thanks!

1. This is all in Settings -> Configure Krita -> General group -> Cursor tab.
The flashing on/off 'sonar circle' is probably the outline shape with 'While painting - Show Outline' disabled.
If you want to stop it turning on/off, enable 'While painting - Show outline'.
If it's a circle then that's because the brush preset you've choosen has a circular brush tip outline.
In Outline Shape, you can choose to have 'No Outline' which will leave you with just the cursor.

2. The Advanced Colour Selector does have the Colour History vertical column of patches on its right side but that needs to be populated manually.
It is possible to arrange the Palette docker horizontally across the entire window to give a horizontal palette.
Then you could make your own palette that was 16 columns wide (or whatever) and have up to 16 colours across the palette.
You could also put more rows in and scroll through them to have different 'sets' across the screen.
Example: https://i.imgur.com/fa7bRfP.png

3. In Settings -> Configure Toolbars, there are two groups in the Toolbar: mainToolbar and BrushesAndStuff
For each selected one of those, you can move an item from Current Actions into Available actions and so remove it from the Toolbar.