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:

1. Edit a simple script file (e.g., mouse-script.txt).
2. Add a list of coordinates, movement speeds, delays, and button clicks. For example:

   (x, y, rate) = (500, 500, 50)
   sleep = 5
   click = left
   

3. 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.

Answer 1

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!