JavaScript: Check if mouse button down?

Question

Is there a way to detect if a mouse button is currently down in JavaScript?

I know about the "mousedown" event, but that's not what I need. Some time AFTER the mouse button is pressed, I want to be able to detect if it is still pressed down.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Regarding Pax' solution: it doesn't work if user clicks more than one button intentionally or accidentally. Don't ask me how I know :-(.

The correct code should be like that:

var mouseDown = 0;
document.body.onmousedown = function() { 
  ++mouseDown;
}
document.body.onmouseup = function() {
  --mouseDown;
}

With the test like this:

if(mouseDown){
  // crikey! isn't she a beauty?
}

If you want to know what button is pressed, be prepared to make mouseDown an array of counters and count them separately for separate buttons:

// let's pretend that a mouse doesn't have more than 9 buttons
var mouseDown = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
    mouseDownCount = 0;
document.body.onmousedown = function(evt) { 
  ++mouseDown[evt.button];
  ++mouseDownCount;
}
document.body.onmouseup = function(evt) {
  --mouseDown[evt.button];
  --mouseDownCount;
}

Now you can check what buttons were pressed exactly:

if(mouseDownCount){
  // alright, let's lift the little bugger up!
  for(var i = 0; i < mouseDown.length; ++i){
    if(mouseDown[i]){
      // we found it right there!
    }
  }
}

Now be warned that the code above would work only for standard-compliant browsers that pass you a button number starting from 0 and up. IE uses a bit mask of currently pressed buttons:

• 0 for "nothing is pressed"
• 1 for left
• 2 for right
• 4 for middle
• and any combination of above, e.g., 5 for left + middle

So adjust your code accordingly! I leave it as an exercise.

And remember: IE uses a global event object called … "event".

Incidentally IE has a feature useful in your case: when other browsers send "button" only for mouse button events (onclick, onmousedown, and onmouseup), IE sends it with onmousemove too. So you can start listening for onmousemove when you need to know the button state, and check for evt.button as soon as you got it — now you know what mouse buttons were pressed:

// for IE only!
document.body.onmousemove = function(){
  if(event.button){
    // aha! we caught a feisty little sheila!
  }
};

Of course you get nothing if she plays dead and not moving.

Relevant links:

• MouseEvent's button (DOM 2)
• MSDN's button

Update #1: I don't know why I carried over the document.body-style of code. It will be better to attach event handlers directly to the document.