Mouse movements/hooks work, but mouse clicks do not. (kubuntu cosmic 18.10, KDE/Plasma)

Title.

The test case is as simple as:

~/mouse (master|✔) $ sudo python3
Python 3.6.7 (default, Oct 22 2018, 11:32:17) 
[GCC 8.2.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import mouse
>>> mouse.move(50, 50) ## works
>>> mouse.click() ## nothing happens?
>>> ## no error

(alongside this, mouse.wait() and mouse.record() work, but mouse.replay() will replay movements but not clicks)

(the mouse directory is a fresh clone of this repository)

I’m not intimately familiar with how mouse interacts with linux on an i/o level, so i’m going to attempt to provide as much useful information as possible. Let me know what specific information you’d need about my environment.

This is a relatively vanilla installation of kubuntu:

~ $ apt list --installed | grep input

WARNING: apt does not have a stable CLI interface. Use with caution in scripts.

inputattach/cosmic,now 1:1.6.0-2 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libinput-bin/cosmic,now 1.12.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libinput10/cosmic,now 1.12.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
libwinpr-input0.1/cosmic,now 1.1.0~git20140921.1.440916e+dfsg1-15ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xinput/cosmic,now 1.6.2-1build1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xserver-xorg-input-all/cosmic,now 1:7.7+19ubuntu8 amd64 [installed,automatic]
xserver-xorg-input-libinput/cosmic,now 0.28.1-1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
~ $ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 18.10
Release:        18.10
Codename:       cosmic
~ $

With the standard KDE window manager.

Nothing appears in dmesg except for the input: Virtual Keyboard as /devices/virtual/input/input## messages.

[EliRibble]

I reproduced this as well. I tracked it down by reading the code and seeing that on POSIX systems the library is using the uinput module. After creating a sample program based on this blog post I was able to figure out that the issue comes down to this call:

# From _nixcommon.py lines 34 - 39
UI_SET_KEYBIT = 0x40045565
for i in range(256):
    fcntl.ioctl(uinput, UI_SET_KEYBIT, i)

I’m not sure why this is necessary. In my sample C program the analagous call is:

ioctl(fd, UI_SET_KEYBIT, BTN_LEFT);

Where BTN_LEFT on my system is defined as 0x00000110. This means I can replace the Python code with:

fcntl.ioctl(uinput, UI_SET_KEYBIT, 0x00000110)

…and button clicks work again.

I’d submit a PR if I knew this was stable on other systems, but I don’t know that for sure.

[MasterChenSensei]

I reproduced this as well. I tracked it down by reading the code and seeing that on POSIX systems the library is using the uinput module. After creating a sample program based on this blog post I was able to figure out that the issue comes down to this call:

# From _nixcommon.py lines 34 - 39
UI_SET_KEYBIT = 0x40045565
for i in range(256):
    fcntl.ioctl(uinput, UI_SET_KEYBIT, i)

I’m not sure why this is necessary. In my sample C program the analagous call is:

ioctl(fd, UI_SET_KEYBIT, BTN_LEFT);

Where BTN_LEFT on my system is defined as 0x00000110. This means I can replace the Python code with:

fcntl.ioctl(uinput, UI_SET_KEYBIT, 0x00000110)

…and button clicks work again.

I’d submit a PR if I knew this was stable on other systems, but I don’t know that for sure.

Can confirm this fixes the issue (Linux Manjaro user here), thanks for your investigation and help! 😃