Sometimes when you have a little bit of free time, you decide to build things just to see if you can do it regardless of how useful it might actually be. I think this might be one of those occasions.

While working on a different side project, I somehow took a path that led me down looking at the X and Y coordinates of my mouse cursor in relation to its position on my window. Like some of the things that I start working on, I may not have a good reason to do it other than just for the simple fact of challenging myself to make it work.

Before I dive into what I did to make a “mouse tracker”, I wanted to explain my goal of actually making it. My goal is to have a small UI that can track my mouse movements in real time that would show my X and Y coordinates of the cursor based on its location on the window. It is important to know that the X coordinate is based on the position from the left of the window while the Y coordinate is based on the top of the window.

The process to get your mouse coordinates is actually pretty simple. We just have to look at the Position property in the System.Windows.Forms.Cursor class. Note that you will have to use Add-Type System.Windows.Forms if running from the console!

[System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position

Note the X and Y coordinates above. This means that at the time that I ran the command, my mouse cursor was 54 pixels from the top of my screen and 362 pixels from the left of my screen. Now that we know how to get the mouse coordinates, the next step is to create our UI to display this on the screen.

I do want to add that my example code includes stuff related to runspaces because I make it a habit to put all of my UI stuff in runspaces for better responsiveness.

$Runspacehash = [hashtable]::Synchronized(@{})
$Runspacehash.host = $Host
$Runspacehash.runspace = [RunspaceFactory]::CreateRunspace()
$Runspacehash.runspace.ApartmentState = 'STA'
$Runspacehash.runspace.ThreadOptions = 'ReuseThread'
$Runspacehash.runspace.Open()
$Runspacehash.psCmd = {Add-Type -AssemblyName PresentationCore,PresentationFramework,WindowsBase,System.Windows.Forms}.GetPowerShell()
$Runspacehash.runspace.SessionStateProxy.SetVariable('Runspacehash',$Runspacehash)
$Runspacehash.psCmd.Runspace = $Runspacehash.runspace
$Runspacehash.Handle = $Runspacehash.psCmd.AddScript({

Since I only care about showing the X and Y coordinates on the screen, I am going with a Grid that has 2 rows and 2 columns to show the coordinates. I also want to make this pretty small as I have no need to display a large UI just to display something like this. Being that I am using WPF as my UI, I will create the front end UI using XAML.

#Build the GUI
[xml]$xaml = @"
<Window
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
x:Name="Window" WindowStartupLocation = "CenterScreen"
Width = "80" Height = "50" ShowInTaskbar = "False" ResizeMode = "NoResize"
Topmost = "True" WindowStyle = "None" AllowsTransparency="True" Background="Transparent">
<Border BorderBrush="{x:Null}" BorderThickness="1" Height="50" Width="80" HorizontalAlignment="Left"
CornerRadius="15" VerticalAlignment="Top" Name="Border">
<Border.Background>
<LinearGradientBrush StartPoint='0,0' EndPoint='0,1'>
<LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops> <GradientStop Color='#C4CBD8' Offset='0' /> <GradientStop Color='#E6EAF5' Offset='0.2' />
<GradientStop Color='#CFD7E2' Offset='0.9' /> <GradientStop Color='#C4CBD8' Offset='1' /> </LinearGradientBrush.GradientStops>
</LinearGradientBrush>
</Border.Background>
<Grid ShowGridLines='False'>
<Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
<ColumnDefinition Width="*"/>
</Grid.ColumnDefinitions>
<Grid.RowDefinitions>
<RowDefinition Height = '*'/>
<RowDefinition Height = '*'/>
</Grid.RowDefinitions>
<Label x:Name='X_lbl' Tag = 'X' Grid.Column = '0' Grid.Row = '0' FontWeight = 'Bold'
HorizontalContentAlignment="Center">
<TextBlock TextDecorations="Underline"
Text="{Binding Path=Tag,
RelativeSource={RelativeSource Mode=FindAncestor,
AncestorType={x:Type Label}}}"/>
</Label>
<Label x:Name='Y_lbl' Tag = 'Y' Grid.Column = '1' Grid.Row = '0' FontWeight = 'Bold'
HorizontalContentAlignment="Center">
<TextBlock TextDecorations="Underline"
Text="{Binding Path=Tag,
RelativeSource={RelativeSource Mode=FindAncestor,
AncestorType={x:Type Label}}}"/>
</Label>
<Label x:Name='X_data_lbl' Grid.Column = '0' Grid.Row = '1' FontWeight = 'Bold'
HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" />
<Label x:Name='Y_data_lbl' Grid.Column = '1' Grid.Row = '1' FontWeight = 'Bold'
HorizontalContentAlignment="Center" />
</Grid>
</Border>
</Window>
"@

Now I can load up the XAML and connect to my controls that I will need for updating the data.

$reader=(New-Object System.Xml.XmlNodeReader $xaml)
$Window=[Windows.Markup.XamlReader]::Load( $reader )

#region Connect to Controls
$xaml.SelectNodes("//*[@*[contains(translate(name(.),'n','N'),'Name')]]") | ForEach {
New-Variable -Name $_.Name -Value $Window.FindName($_.Name) -Force -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -Scope Script
}
#endregion Connect to Controls

At this point I have a UI that will work if we happened to run it.

[void]$Window.ShowDialog()
}).BeginInvoke()

That last line is just closing the loop with creating my runspace. But what we get is the following:

Getting there! You may have noticed that there is not a close button and if you run this, it may be difficult to move it around based on how I configured the window. I get around this by adding event handlers for the Right and Left mouse buttons to drag the window around and to close  the window.

$Window.Add_MouseRightButtonUp({
$This.close()
})
$Window.Add_MouseLeftButtonDown({
$This.DragMove()
})

We have the UI and the X and Y label already taken care of. The next piece of the puzzle is to get our coordinates to show up so we can start tracking our cursor position. This is where I had to think a little on how to ensure that the coordinates would update as I moved my mouse around. I looked at a number of events for the window but none of them really fit what I wanted to do. We had mouse enter and mouse leave events, but they only updated 1 time each time the event fired meaning that I wasn’t able to get the coordinates any other time.

In the end I decided to use a timer object attached to my window that will update every 10 milliseconds. I figure this was enough of a time that it would appear that the mouse tracker was updating the entire time while I move my mouse.

$Window.Add_SourceInitialized({
#Create Timer object
Write-Verbose 'Creating timer object'
$Script:timer = new-object System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer
#Fire off every 1 minutes
Write-Verbose 'Adding 1 minute interval to timer object'
$timer.Interval = [TimeSpan]'0:0:0.01'
#Add event per tick
Write-Verbose 'Adding Tick Event to timer object'
$timer.Add_Tick({
$Mouse = [System.Windows.Forms.Cursor]::Position
$X_data_lbl.Content = $Mouse.x
$Y_data_lbl.Content = $Mouse.y
})
#Start timer
Write-Verbose 'Starting Timer'
$timer.Start()
If (-NOT $timer.IsEnabled) {
$Window.Close()
}
})

Now I have a working mouse tracker to use for whatever you would like to do with it!

Download MouseTracker

https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/PowerShell-Mouse-Cursor-2cde303d