Mouse control with ctypes in OS X

[Robert Kern]

Paul McNett wrote:
> Niklas Ottosson wrote:
>> I need to get hold of the mouse position and also need to be able to 
>> change it. In windows I have used ctypes.windll.user32.getCursorPos() 
>> and ctypes.windll.user32.setCursorPos() with great success in my program 
>> but now I also need to make a Mac OS X version of the program.
>>
>> Does anyone know what the above libraries and functions are called in OS 
>> X? Any help is greatly appreciated. 
> 
> All I can offer you is the knowledge that OS X will probably not let you 
> set the mouse position, as it is a gross violation of the HIG (The user 
> is in charge of where the mouse appears, not the application).

Of course, sometimes you are not writing an application but a program that lets
the user interact with the computer in a different way to enable assistive
devices or just new hardware.

There are undocumented (near as I can tell) functions in IOKit for posting HID
events, including setting the mouse location. In
/System/Library/Frameworks/IOKit.framework/Headers/hidsystem/IOHIDLib.h there
are the functions IOHIDPostEvent() and IOHIDSetMouseLocation(). I haven't found
any documentation on these, but Google does find some code using them.

Googling around a bit more, however, I see that the Quartz Event Services is
documented and provides similar functionality. The DarwiinRemote project has a
mouse emulation mode for the Nintendo Wii controller that uses this API. It's
only available in OSX 10.4, however.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/QuartzEventServicesRef/index.html

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco