Sending Programmatic Mouse Events to X

Question

I am somewhat new to X development on Linux. I'm wondering what are best practices (or links to resources) for programmatically sending cursor events. Moving the cursor to a normalized (X,Y), creating right/left mouse clicks, etc. Ideally this would be something in C/C++.

I have played around with the Qt QCursor but I'd like to know the raw way to accomplish this.

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:31

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You need to be learning Xlib if you want the "raw" way to accomplish it.

If you want even MORE raw, you'll want to study the X protocol.

What you're asking about is pretty darn specialized knowledge. You should head over to the X.org mailing lists or X related newsgroups.

answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:31

Edward Strange

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Thanks for the suggest I'll hit that up. – Ternary Dec 09 '10 at 19:34

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:32

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I think you can use XSendEvent. There's some sample code here which uses XQueryPointer to populate most of the event fields.

If you just want to move the pointer, use XWarpPointer.

answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:32

Jason Orendorff

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This looks promising. Thank you. – Ternary Dec 09 '10 at 19:59
XWarpPointer() and XTest seem to require calling XFlush() to get immediate results. Is there a way around this? – Ternary Dec 09 '10 at 22:08

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:34

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Also check out xdotool

http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/xdotool/

answered Dec 09 '10 at 19:34

Falmarri

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Sending Programmatic Mouse Events to X

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