How can I record mouse clicks (left and right) with coordinates and time?
3 views (last 30 days)
Show older comments
Hello,
I am trying to capture mouse movements outside of the GUI, on second display while users are using another program. So far, I manage to record the coordinates, every 0.1 seconds period, by using timer function. I need to add mouse clicks (left or right button down and ups). Does anyone know how can I do this? I try to Buttondownfnc but it only works with a figures not outside of the Matlab..or is there any workaround?
fileID = fopen('motion.txt','wt');
t = timer('ExecutionMode', 'fixedRate','Period', 0.1, 'TasksToExecute', 200, ...
'TimerFcn', @(~,~) fprintf(fileID,'(X, Y) = (%g, %g)\n', get(0, 'PointerLocation')));
start(t);
8 Comments
Mario Malic
on 6 Mar 2021
Some of the Adobe programs support the Active X controls IIRC, maybe your software supports that, if it does, maybe there are methods that track mouse movement.
Answers (1)
Jan
on 6 Mar 2021
Edited: Jan
on 6 Mar 2021
You can emulate this with WindowsAPI. Setting the window completely invisble does not work, because with Alpha=0.0 the mouse events are not caught anymore. But with Alpha= 0.01 you cannot see the window anymore, but clicks are still caught:
FigH = figure;
FigH.ButtonDownFcn = @(FigH, Event) disp(Event);
drawnow;
% Set inner window covers complete screen on monitor m'th monitor:
m = 1;
WindowAPI(FigH, 'Position', 'full', m);
% Allmost transparent (I do not see anything, do you):
WindowAPI(FigH, 'Alpha', 0.01);
% Crop window border, such this does not cover the margins
% of other monitors:
WindowAPI(FigH, 'Clip', true);
% Set window to top or catch at least the focus:
WindowAPI(FigH, 'Top');
WindowAPI(FigH, 'SetFocus');
for k = 1:100
pause(0.1)
disp(get(groot, 'PointerLocation'))
end
delete(FigH); % Important: Otherwise the window steals all events!
5 Comments
Jan
on 8 Mar 2021
My suggestion would be to record the mouse clicks in the transparent window, move the Acrobat window to top an to emulate the formerly recorded mouse clicks.
For fast double clicks this might fail. With SendMessage there is no need for a time consuming movement of the Acrobat window to the top. But as said already, I did not get the Mex-function to work.
There are some mouse recording softwares, which track the mouse position and the clicks. Do you have a good reason to do this in Matlab?
See Also
Categories
Find more on Interactive Control and Callbacks in Help Center and File Exchange
Community Treasure Hunt
Find the treasures in MATLAB Central and discover how the community can help you!
Start Hunting!