Qt 5, get the mouse position in a screen

armitage picture armitage · Aug 16, 2015 · Viewed 27.7k times · Source

First of all, I'd like to mention that I found that related post How to get the mouse position on the screen in Qt? but it "just didn't work" for me. I made some tests, and the results didn't work as I expected, so I decided to make a new post to talk about the test I made and to find an alternative solution.

That's the code I used to make the test:

QScreen *screen0 = QApplication::screens().at(0);
QScreen *screen1 = QApplication::screens().at(1);

printf("screen0 %s \n", screen0->name().toStdString().c_str());
printf("screen1 %s \n", screen1->name().toStdString().c_str());

// Position on first screen.
QPoint pos0 = QCursor::pos(screen0);

// Position on second screen.
QPoint pos1 = QCursor::pos(screen1);

printf("pos 0: %d, %d \n", pos0.x(), pos0.y());
printf("pos 1: %d, %d \n", pos1.x(), pos1.y());

// Get position without screen.
QPoint pos = QCursor::pos();
printf("pos: %d, %d \n", pos.x(), pos.y());

What I was expecting, is that only one screen would return a valid position, since the cursor is only at one screen, not on both. But it's not the case, the both positions (pos0 and pos1) has the exactly same value, as we can see on the output:

screen0 DVI-D-0 
screen1 HDMI-0 
pos 0: 1904, 1178 
pos 1: 1904, 1178 
pos: 1904, 1178 

Since the both positions has the same values, I can't know at which screen is the cursor. I don't know if that's a normal behavior or a bug, since the documentation doesn't say what happens when the screen argument isn't the screen where the mouse is.

My idea, is to open/launch an application (executed by a Qt daemon that must detect the selected screen) to the screen where the mouse is. I know that with libX11 it's possible, because I did it in the past, but I need to work with Qt 5, and I can't figure out how to do detect the selected screen with Qt.

I also made other tests, using QApplication and QDesktopWidget classes with no luck.

Answer

Rafael Monteiro picture Rafael Monteiro · Aug 17, 2015

That's really weird. As a workaround, you could try this:

QPoint globalCursorPos = QCursor::pos();
int mouseScreen = qApp->desktop()->screenNumber(globalCursorPos);

Now you know which screen the cursor is in. Then you could find the cursor position within that screen doing this:

QRect mouseScreenGeometry = qApp->desktop()->screen(mouseScreen)->geometry();
QPoint localCursorPos = globalCursorPos - mouseScreenGeometry.topLeft();