Is right click a Javascript event?

Question

As others have mentioned, the right mouse button can be detected through the usual mouse events (mousedown, mouseup, click). However, if you're looking for a firing event when the right-click menu is brought up, you're looking in the wrong place. The right-click/context menu is also accessible via the keyboard (shift+F10 or context menu key on Windows and some Linux). In this situation, the event that you're looking for is oncontextmenu:

window.oncontextmenu = function ()
{
    showCustomMenu();
    return false;     // cancel default menu
}

As for the mouse events themselves, browsers set a property to the event object that is accessible from the event handling function:

document.body.onclick = function (e) {
    var isRightMB;
    e = e || window.event;

    if ("which" in e)  // Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari/Chrome) & Opera
        isRightMB = e.which == 3; 
    else if ("button" in e)  // IE, Opera 
        isRightMB = e.button == 2; 

    alert("Right mouse button " + (isRightMB ? "" : " was not") + "clicked!");
} 

window.oncontextmenu - MDC

have a look at the following jQuery code:

$("#myId").mousedown(function(ev){
      if(ev.which == 3)
      {
            alert("Right mouse button clicked on element with id myId");
      }
});

The value of which will be:

• 1 for the left button
• 2 for the middle button
• 3 for the right button

You could use the event window.oncontextmenu, for example:

window.oncontextmenu = function () {
  alert('Right Click')
}

<h1>Please Right Click here!</h1>

If you want to detect right mouse click, you shouldn't use MouseEvent.which property as it is non-standard and there's large incompatibility among browsers. (see MDN) You should instead use MouseEvent.button. It returns a number representing a given button:

• 0: Main button pressed, usually the left button or the un-initialized state
• 1: Auxiliary button pressed, usually the wheel button or the middle button (if present)
• 2: Secondary button pressed, usually the right button
• 3: Fourth button, typically the Browser Back button
• 4: Fifth button, typically the Browser Forward button

MouseEvent.button handles more input types than just standard mouse:

Buttons may be configured differently to the standard "left to right" layout. A mouse configured for left-handed use may have the button actions reversed. Some pointing devices only have one button and use keyboard or other input mechanisms to indicate main, secondary, auxilary, etc. Others may have many buttons mapped to different functions and button values.

Reference:

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/which
2. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MouseEvent/button

Ya, though w3c says the right click can be detected by the click event, onClick is not triggered through right click in usual browsers.

In fact, right click only trigger onMouseDown onMouseUp and onContextMenu.

Thus, you can regard "onContextMenu" as the right click event. It's an HTML5.0 standard.