MacOS – AppleScript: How to double-click & right-click at cursor location

applescriptclickmacos

I want to be able to double-left-click, then immediately right-click using AppleScript.

The location of the click is wherever my cursor is located at the time that the AppleScript is triggered.

The AppleScript will be triggered by FastScripts via keyboard shortcut. I would like the script to work across all applications.

I installed cliclick. When I type cliclick -h into Terminal, I see that it can double-click, but there is no mention of the right-click.

Best Answer

Since you already know how to double-click with cliclick, my answer focuses on the right-click and traditionally on a Mac one used to preform a right-click via control-click, and as such you need to do the same thing when using cliclick.

As an example, using cliclick in Terminal, it will attempt to open the manual page for cliclick. I said attempt to open because cliclick doesn't have a manual page but will use the command line to preform some actions that will control-click (right-click) to bring up the context menu, move the mouse to click Open man page as I've selected cliclick in the command line before pressing enter to execute the command line.

The image below shows the command line twice just so you can plainly see the full command line in the first line as part is obfuscated in the second line that's preforming the actual clicking on the
Open man page from the context menu.

The image below is what appeared and was clicked when the cliclick command line was executed.

The image below is cropped but is presented to show it tried to open the manual page for cliclick.

I do not use FastScripts, however the example command should help you to understand what to pass cliclick to do whatever it is you're trying to do.

The cliclick command line explained:

cliclick kd:ctrl c:+0,+0 ku:ctrl m:+5,+5 c:+0,+0 - Full command line.
cliclick - The binary executable.
kd:ctrl - Press the control key down.
c:+0,+0 - Click relative to where the mouse is presently.
ku:ctrl - Let the control key up.
m:+5,+5 - Move the mouse five pixels on the x,y axis relative to where the mouse is presently.
c:+0,+0 - Click relative to where the mouse is presently.
Note: The full command line above can also be expressed as,
cliclick kd:ctrl c:. ku:ctrl m:+5,+5 c:. since a . can be used in place of x,y axis coordinates e.g., +0,+0 for the relative position of the mouse. I personally prefer to use the former over the latter, however both forms work.

As you can see in the first image that cliclick was selected and the mouse, show as a text cursor, is right over the selection, then when the cliclick commands were executed, it opened the man page Terminal window for it, although these isn't one. However, it shows that a right-click was made and the mouse moved to the entry on the context-menu and clicked.

In AppleScript the above command line would be wrapped in a do shell script command as shown below:

do shell script "/usr/local/bin/cliclick kd:ctrl c:+0,+0 ku:ctrl m:+5,+5 c:+0,+0"

Note: Use the fully qualified pathname to the cliclick binary executable if it's in a location that is not in the PATH passed to AppleScript.

Related Solutions

How to code an AppleScript to do a mouse click on a menu bar item

There's a scripting addition called "AppleScript Toolbox" (it's an osax). Get it at https://astoolbox.wordpress.com/

With that, you can simply write:

AST click at {10, 20}

That clicks into the menu bar, for instance, and opens the Apple menu.

If you want to preserve the original cursor position first, use this:

set origPos to AST mouse point location

And to restore it use:

AST set mouse point location origPos

MacOS – How to restart a currently-running application with AppleScript

The following code example assume that the Run AppleScript action starts with an on run command without any list, e.g. {input, parameters} and consequently ends the script with end run:

on run

    (*
            This comment represents the e.g. previous 99 lines of code.
        *)

    set buttonChoice to button returned of (display alert "Do you want to replace this entry?" as critical buttons {"Start over", "No", "Yes"})
    try
        if buttonChoice is "Start over" then
            return on run
        end if
    end try

    (*
            This comment represents the rest of the code in the script.
        *)

end run

Note that I tested this in macOS Sierra 10.12 and while it does appear to start over, because if you press the "Start over" button it loops until you select another choice, I'm not sure this is the best way to implement this. I say that because I do not know the structure and coding of the rest of the script and that may make a difference along with the fact that while testing other code on each side of this, I was able to crash the app depending on what was going on if I looped more then once at this point.

So with that said, I'm offering this as something to test throughly before implementing it in the final code.

I'd suggest just allowing the user to terminate the app with a message to manually restart by pressing the key-combo to trigger the service that starts the app over implementing a loop such as this.

Best Answer

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How to code an AppleScript to do a mouse click on a menu bar item

MacOS – How to restart a currently-running application with AppleScript

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