Simulate mouse movement in Ubuntu

Question

Problem

Am looking to automatically move the mouse cursor and simulate mouse button clicks from the command-line using an external script. Am not looking to:

Record mouse movement and playback (e.g., xnee, xmacro)
Instantly move the mouse from one location to another (e.g., xdotool, Python's warp_pointer)

Ideal Solution

What I'd like to do is the following:

Edit a simple script file (e.g., mouse-script.txt).
Add a list of coordinates, movement speeds, delays, and button clicks. For example:
```
(x, y, rate) = (500, 500, 50)
sleep = 5
click = left
```
Run the script: xsim < mouse-script.txt.

Question

How do you automate mouse movement so that it transitions from its current location to another spot on the screen, at a specific velocity? For example:

xdotool mousemove 500 500 --rate 50

The --rate 50 doesn't exist with xdotool.

Corey Goldberg · Accepted Answer · 2015-10-15 23:15:44Z

20

on newer versions of Ubuntu (14.04+), you can use Autopilot, a UI testing tool for Ubuntu. It is made for creating and running user interface tests, but can also be used for basic GUI automation tasks.

to install:

$ sudo apt-get install python3-autopilot

an example script (Python3) to automate mouse movement:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

from autopilot.input import Mouse

mouse = Mouse.create()
mouse.move(100, 50)
mouse.click()

You would run this just like any other Python3 script. Watch your mouse pointer move!

edited Oct 15, 2015 at 23:15

answered Dec 16, 2014 at 15:32

Corey Goldberg

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3 Comments

Henrique de Sousa Over a year ago

Even after installing python3-autopilot, I'm getting ImportError: No module named autopilot.input. Turns out I had to run using python3. Cheers

SL5net Over a year ago

ubuntu python3 msg is Python 3.8.5 (default, Jul 28 2020, 12:59:40) but i have the same error ImportError: No module named autopilot.input what could i do?

Carl Cheung Over a year ago

Dont use pip3 install, but sudo apt install, then no more ImportError

Dave Jarvis · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-15 17:35:39Z

13

Download xaut for Python
Follow the README instructions

Run:

sudo apt-get install swig x11proto-xext-dev libx11-dev libxtst-dev
cd /usr/local/src
tar zxf xaut-0.2.0.tar.gz
./configure

Edit src/Makefile

Change the CFLAGS line as follows:

CFLAGS = -Wall -fPIC -fno-stack-protector

Run:
```
make
```
Copy /usr/local/src/xaut-0.2.0/python/build/lib/* to a new directory.
Change to that new directory.

Copy and paste the following script into mm.py:

import xaut
mouse = xaut.mouse()
delay mouse.move_delay( 100 )
mouse.move( 500, 500 )

Run the script:
```
python mm.py
```

edited Apr 15, 2012 at 17:35

answered Jun 7, 2010 at 0:18

Dave Jarvis

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1 Comment

George Eracleous Over a year ago

Also, when you do the steps abobe it will fail on Ubuntu 11.10. First of all in my case in the makefile I had to add the absolute path of libX11.so which is not in /usr/local/lib as the makefile suggests but in usr/local/lib/i386-linux-gnu. Then when u fix that it can compile again. So change ld -shared to gcc -shared in the makefile and that's it

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