how to get MouseMove and MouseClick in bash?

Question

I'm wondering how to get the MouseClick and MouseMove events in bash scripting for my own simple OS events.

Please tell me how to get that events.

Answer 1

The xterm terminal emulator defines some control sequences to do mouse tracking, you can learn more about them in the section Mouse Tracking in the document ctlseqs for the xterm distribution. If you have xterm installed, you'll probably have a copy at /usr/share/doc/xterm/ctlseqs.txt.gz or a similar path.

Most terminal emulators running on the X Window System (e.g: Konsole, gnome-terminal, eterm, ...) understand at least some of these control sequences. If you want to use them directly on one of Linux's virtual terminals, you'll probably have to run gpm(8).

There are several control sequences for enabling and disabling mouse movement reporting:

• 9 -> X10 mouse reporting, for compatibility with X10's xterm, reports on button press.
• 1000 -> X11 mouse reporting, reports on button press and release.
• 1001 -> highlight reporting, useful for reporting mouse highlights.
• 1002 -> button movement reporting, reports movement when a button is pressed.
• 1003 -> all movement reporting, reports all movements.

The control sequence is CSI ? number h for enabling and CSI ? number l for disabling. CSI is either ESC [ or character 0x9b. So, you could use them as follows:

echo -e "\e[?1000h"

Then, you'll get a bunch of characters on button press, see ctlseqs or console_codes(4) for details. Then, you can disable mouse tracking with:

echo -e "\e[?1000l"

Unfortunately, the previous mouse reporting modes can only handle coordinates up to 223 (255 - 32), or in some situations 95 (127 - 32). So there are some new switches to change the format in which mouse coordinates are reported:

• 1006 -> report back as decimal values (xterm, many other terminal emulators, but not urxvt)
• 1015 -> report back as decimal values (urxvt, xterm, other terminal emulators, some applications find it complex to parse)
• 1005 -> report back encoded as utf-8 (xterm, urxvt, broken in several ways)

A good strategy for an application would be to enable mouse reporting, then (optionally request urxvt 1015 mode and then) request SGR 1006 mode. The application should handle both the new and legacy mouse reporting responses, to continue working on terminal emulators without support for the new modes.

More information on the new reporting modes at:

• midnight-commander ticket #2956
• tmux ticket #26
• midnight-commander ticket #2662

Answer 2

Based on the precious informations given here, and after a bit of digging around.

We can catch mouse downs and releases, the wheel movement and side, the middle click (wheel click), and positions. No right click.

The following is only an example in php, used as cli. It hide the movements printing on the terminal, and set it back properly when quiting.

It is verbose enough to be adapted in any programming langs able to read the STDIN and print to STDOUT, so surely a big list of them!

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
system("stty -icanon");                                  // Enable shell input
system("stty -echo");                                    // Disable characters printing
echo "\e[?1003h\e[?1015h\e[?1006h";                      // Mouse trap all, urxvt, SGR1006  

function shutdown(){                                     // Cleaning before quiting
    echo "\e[?1000l";                                    // Disable mouse trap
    system("stty echo");                                 // Enable back characters printing
    exit;                                                // Cleaned, quit
}
register_shutdown_function("shutdown");                  // Handle regular END of script

declare(ticks = 1);                                      // Allow posix signal handling
pcntl_signal(SIGINT,"shutdown");                         // Catch SIGINT (CTRL+C)   

$KEY = "";
while ($KEY = fread(STDIN,16)) {
  $e = explode(";",explode("<",$KEY)[1]);
  if ($e[0] === "0" && substr($e[2],-1) === "M"){
     echo "BUTTON DOWN, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "0" && substr($e[2],-1) === "m"){
     echo "BUTTON UP, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "64"){
     echo "WHEEL SCROLL UP, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "65"){
     echo "WHEEL SCROLL DOWN, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "1" && substr($e[2],-1) === "M"){
     echo "WHEEL BUTTON DOWN, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "1" && substr($e[2],-1) === "m"){
     echo "WHEEL BUTTON UP, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
  if ($e[0] === "35"){
     echo "MOUSE MOVE, LINE ".substr($e[2],0,-1)." COLUMN ".$e[1]."\n"; 
  }
}