Get mouse events outside of Tkinter window in Python

Question

I am writing a program that connects to design software, like an external plugin, then monitors mouse movement and events. It will take actions based on to the state of the connected software mouse events.

The idea is the external application will have the capability to interface to multiple similar programs instead of program specific plugins.

The prototype, and potentially the production software, is being written in python using the Tkinter GUI library. The attempt is to make it simple and portable.

I was easily able to grab "OS" level mouse position (true screen X,Y) without the Tkinter window needing to be active. My issue is that I am not finding a way to easily get the mouse click events from Tkinter. I can only gather events when over the active Tkinter window.

Tkinter provides this for mouse position:

coord = self.gui.winfo_pointerxy()

I cannot find similar for mouse events. There are libraries like selfspy and Pymouse (now part of PyUserInput) that monitor events, but are mainly for control of the input devices. My backup idea is to use these libraries for reference on writing my own input monitoring program.

My two main platforms are Mac and Windows.

Long story short:

Can Tkinter give me mouse events when the events are outside the Tkinter window.
If not, are there other options "out of the box" that can give me mouse X,Y and mouse events.
If there are no out of the box solutions, some recommendation on approach and API. (looks like win32api for windows, Quartz and/or Cocoa in Mac and Xlib in Linux)

Thanks for your time

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

1

This way you get the mouse position with TKinter.

import Tkinter as tk
root = tk.Tk()

def motion(event):
    x, y = event.x, event.y
    print('{}, {}'.format(x, y))

root.bind('<Motion>', motion)
root.mainloop()

There is a cross-platform module pyautogui (works for os x, windows, linux).

pyautogui.posistion() //returns tuple with mouse x and y values
                      // same for python 3.x

refer to this article how to detect the mouse clicks for windows

edited May 23 '17 at 11:52

Community

1
1

answered Jun 10 '16 at 13:32

Tristan

2,000
17
32

Thank you for posting. This seems very helpful for the mouse position and movement, but is button/click events outside the app window also available with these APIs? The simplest example I can think of of type of functionality I am looking for is a screenshot application that you need to click and drag outside of the app window. You need to be able to see mouse clicks along with mouse movement/position. – TravisT Jun 11 '16 at 13:59
1

Except on widows I do not think there are any methods to get mouse click events outside your window. – Tristan Jun 11 '16 at 15:58

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 15 '16 at 14:20

On Mac, the easiest option is probably NSEvent's addGlobalMonitorForEventsMatchingMask:handler:: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/Classes/NSEvent_Class/#//apple_ref/occ/clm/NSEvent/addGlobalMonitorForEventsMatchingMask:handler:

Note that this is specifically for events sent to other applications, and not your own.

On a lower level, you can also look into using Quartz event taps. Simple example using PyObjC:

from Quartz import CGEventTapCreate
# ...etc.

def listen_for_mouse_events():
  mouse_tap = CGEventTapCreate(
    kCGSessionEventTap,
    kCGHeadInsertEventTap,
    kCGEventTapOptionListenOnly,
    CGEventMaskBit(kCGEventLeftMouseDown) | CGEventMaskBit(kCGEventLeftMouseUp),
    on_mouse_event,
    None
    )
  runLoopSource = CFMachPortCreateRunLoopSource(None, mouse_tap, 0)
  CFRunLoopAddSource(
    CFRunLoopGetCurrent(),
    runLoopSource,
    kCFRunLoopDefaultMode
  )
  CGEventTapEnable(mouse_tap, True)

def on_mouse_event(proxy, event_type, event, refcon):
  location = CGEventGetLocation(event)
  if (event_type == kCGEventLeftMouseDown):
    pass
  elif (event_type == kCGEventLeftMouseUp):
    pass

(I'm afraid I can't comment in detail regarding a Windows solution.)

Totally off-topic! The question says "outside the **TKINTER** window!" I would downvote you if I didn't dislike this action. — Apostolos, Jan 20 '20 at 17:55

Get mouse events outside of Tkinter window in Python

2 Answers2