Detecting Mouse clicks in windows using python

Question

How can I detect mouse clicks regardless of the window the mouse is in?

Perferabliy in python, but if someone can explain it in any langauge I might be able to figure it out.

I found this on microsoft's site: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms645533(VS.85).aspx

But I don't see how I can detect or pick up the notifications listed.

Tried using pygame's pygame.mouse.get_pos() function as follows:

import pygame
pygame.init()
while True:
    print pygame.mouse.get_pos()

This just returns 0,0. I'm not familiar with pygame, is something missing?

In anycase I'd prefer a method without the need to install a 3rd party module. (other than pywin32 http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/ )

Answer 1

The only way to detect mouse events outside your program is to install a Windows hook using SetWindowsHookEx. The pyHook module encapsulates the nitty-gritty details. Here's a sample that will print the location of every mouse click:

import pyHook
import pythoncom

def onclick(event):
    print event.Position
    return True

hm = pyHook.HookManager()
hm.SubscribeMouseAllButtonsDown(onclick)
hm.HookMouse()
pythoncom.PumpMessages()
hm.UnhookMouse()

You can check the example.py script that is installed with the module for more info about the event parameter.

pyHook might be tricky to use in a pure Python script, because it requires an active message pump. From the tutorial:

Any application that wishes to receive notifications of global input events must have a Windows message pump. The easiest way to get one of these is to use the PumpMessages method in the Win32 Extensions package for Python. [...] When run, this program just sits idle and waits for Windows events. If you are using a GUI toolkit (e.g. wxPython), this loop is unnecessary since the toolkit provides its own.