using two mouse POINTERs

meyerm · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 1:47 pm Post subject: using two mouse POINTERs

Hi,

I can attach as many mice as I want to my computer using XFree. Fine. But - and this is a honest question - is it possible to use 2 mousepointers? Speak: each mouse drives it own cursor? (focus the window under the mouse last moved f.ex - or [but that wouldn't be very nice...] a second keyboard)

Despite of working with it during app-development, it would be really cool clicking inside my IM or email program while running Enemy-Territory on the other screen :-D

The XFree manual pages don't seem to cover this topic :-(

GentooBox · Veteran Joined: 22 Jun 2003 Posts: 1168 Location: Denmark

just do 2 x startx ?

then you have 2 mousepointers.
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Promit · Guru Joined: 15 Nov 2003 Posts: 344

I think he means on the same screen/display.
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meyerm · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 2:57 pm Post subject:

tactless · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 3:20 pm Post subject:

Highly doubt it. When programming, you usually use calls in the style of getmousepos(&x,&y), without specifying which mouse... so unless X has it abstracted really well, the applications simply wouldn't support it. And even if the applications would, games probably wouldn't.
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meyerm · Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2003 3:38 pm Post subject:

hmm, concerning games this is fairly sure. But they could just grab the "corepointer". Most Desktopapplications don't want to get the mouseposition but just need to get clicked... Shouldn't this be possible if X is supporting it? Hmm, perhaps the toolkit should do this too... :-(

Well, after all it sounded quite interessting ;-)

David_Escott · l33t Joined: 12 Jan 2003 Posts: 952 Location: Boston, MA

Run two servers. That would be the easy solution especially if all you were going to do was play games on the second screen.

mirko_3 · l33t Joined: 02 Nov 2003 Posts: 605 Location: Birreria

do let us know if it works!

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meyerm · Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2003 2:18 pm Post subject:

No, that wasn't the main-reason I wanted to have this setup. Of course this would be a really nice feature - but using a second X is the way I go now for games (so even the "game-X" can crash, I still can just switch to my "work-X"). Of course I can't use this when I want to have the game on one screen and my IM on another.

My motivation is that I'm developing OpenGL-apps and would like to keep one mousepointer grapped by my VR-app and the other to keep on working in KDE, ok ok: debugging ;-)

Well, perhaps Xfree 5 will help us out here. Thank you all for your answers.

@mirko_3: As I said above, playing games on another X-Server f.ex. on vt8 - of course with another color depth and fixed resolution (some games with wine have problems using the mouse correct if the desktop is lager than the current resolution) - works quite well. And of course you can switch very fast between your game and your TeX-Editor if your boss/mother comes in ;-)