Thread: How to create a system wide mouse or keyboard hook?

Does anyone know of an easy way of creating a system wide mouse or keyboard hook other than me writing it in C/C++ then implementing JNI?

Cause that seems like a lot of work just for a global hook :/

Thanks,
Chris

A mouse hook for example tracks all the mouse events. System wide because I don't want to limit it to say my application, such as a MouseListener would do...if that makes sense?

Chris

Well I have looked to no avail. When I get home I might have a look into writing a C Win32 Hook and linking with JNI. Once I've done that I'll make it all readily avaliable to everyone who wants it. Since it is quite common.

Chris

Hey JavaPF. I've tried to get started, I have developed the basic hook in C using Win32, however I need to get a quick understanding of JNI. When I use
javah -jni -classpath <class location> <class>

It seems to run flawlessly but does not produce the required .h file. This is my main problem at the moment, once I have got that then I need to try and get C++ to compile down to a god damn DLL, which is proving more work than expected

Anyhelp with the JNI header generation would be great.

Thanks,
Chris

I haven't found a method of executing custom commands from with the Eclipse IDE or NetBeans, So i was using the commandline. That link you gave appears to point to thin air hehe, so it's not overly useful. Maybe it's just college Filters/Blocks/Proxies messing with it, so i'll try when I get home.

Thanks very much though,
Chris

I've now migrated to notepad and command prompt, and at last progress! I've had to ditch all the high level IDEs lol, ah well it's all good .

Anyways, I just wanted to tell you that I have now begun the full coding of the system, so I hope to keep you updated with progress and code.

Can I ask, is there any functionality that you would like me to add? As I don't know how much you know about C++ and JNI so I figure I could add them in at the start.

Thanks,
Chris

Just wanted to give you an update, I haven't had much chance to get to work on this due to college exams. But I am now in the middle of my exams and will be finished at the end of next week. So hopefully I will be able to dig out old code and go back over this and finish it off and get the code to you

Also i'd like to produce a sample macro'ing program using it and the Robot API, which should be quite nice.

Regards,
Chris

Just for the record it's not complex, its just a god damn stupid with UnsatisfiedLinker error, so its hard to even test things, I don't even know why it is doing that to me -_-

Chris

I finally found out what the problem was

I was forgetting to compile it as if it were C code rather than C++, cause C doesn't name mangle like C++ does lol!

Chris

ok ok. Now this one is not so much a programming problem, I just want some help with a bit of logic. For the keyboardhook, I've decided what information to proccess, what key is pressed, is the alt key pressed and is it an extended key, plus was it a keyup or keydown.

However for the mouse, there are a fair few different states that need to be proccessed, 9 in actually fact. Now If I do this in C/C++ its not to hard because they have nice names like WM_LMBUTTONDOWN but, then there are a whole list of different things they could be true such as ctrldown and shift downand any other mouse button down. So there would be alot of possibles combinations, which would get messy sending the data back to Java. But if I was to do it in Java i'd have to find out a long list of numbers. So basically, I need to know what key data I should procces in C++ and send to Java, my suggestion is as Follows.

Which button
Up or Down
is ctrl pressed
is shift pressed
x pos
y pos.

Thanks,
Chris