Factorio Forums

Is there a way that when I select an item to build the inventory of the player will auto hide instead of stay in the middle of the screen where you can't see where you are putting the item? I know I can press E to hide.
Also, is there a way to make the item leave your hand automatically when the item no longer exist in the inventory? Sometimes I just wanna build one item and there is only one in my inventory but I always need to press Q to make my hands free again.

That's by design. The very vast majority of the time, when you're building something, it's either from the quickbar, or the blueprint library (OK, I'll also add copy/paste and pipette tool for completion).
The use case where you have to actively pick an item from the inventory because it's neither of those is likely extremely rare.

And for the item staying in place, that would prevent from placing ghosts of items for the construction bots to build. They come in mid game, but once you have them, building everything by hand becomes unbearable.