Saturday, February 6, 2021

Swap mouse buttons via Powershell

I'm a southpaw, but I can mouse with either hand...
At home, I have the mouse on the left, at work, on the right... For numerous reasons...

Occasionally, I run into situations where I need to swap mouse buttons on my home computer, when I remote connect to something set up for right-hand mouse...ing.

This script will do a quick mouse-button swap. 

Though it includes all of the mechanics needed to interact with this setting, for any other scenario.

Note that: 

Just changing the registry value, will work... But, you'd have to reboot.
Pushing that 'true / false' value, to the '
user32.dll' file, does the swap on-the-fly (it also changes the reg key value).
You may need to adjust that '
1..10', (increase the value past '10', I mean) if the second time the 'MouseReport' runs, and the swap does not show as changed yet... It does take a second or two...


$swapButtons
= Add-Type -MemberDefinition @'
[DllImport("user32.dll")]
public static extern bool SwapMouseButton(bool swap);
'@
-Name "NativeMethods" -Namespace "PInvoke" -PassThru
Function MouseReport {$script:MouseButton = $null; $script:MouseButton = (Get-ItemProperty "HKCU:\Control Panel\Mouse").SwapMouseButtons
If ($MouseButton -eq 0) {Write-Host " Mouse button is set for RIGHT-Handed mouse. " -ForegroundColor Red -BackgroundColor Yellow}
If ($MouseButton -eq 1) {Write-Host " Mouse button is set for LEFT-Handed mouse. " -ForegroundColor Green -BackgroundColor Black}}
MouseReport
    $Choice = @('Y','X'); Do { Write-Host "  Swap?: (Y) / (X): " -NoNewline -ForegroundColor Yellow
    $Swap = (Read-Host).Trim()} Until (($Choice.Contains($Swap.ToUpper()))); If ($Swap -eq "x"){break}
   
# $true for Left-Handed, $false for Right-Handed.
        # Mouse is Right-Handed, change it to Left-Handed
            If ($MouseButton -eq 0) {[bool]$returnValue = $swapButtons::SwapMouseButton($true)}
       
# Mouse is Left-Handed, change it to Right-Handed
            If ($MouseButton -eq 1) {[bool]$returnValue = $swapButtons::SwapMouseButton($false)}
   
1..10 | % { #Give the system time to respond to the above change to the "user32.dll" change.
    If ($_ -lt 10) {Write-Host "." -ForegroundColor Cyan -NoNewline};Start-Sleep -Milliseconds 200
    If ($_ -ge 10) {Write-Host "." -ForegroundColor Cyan}}
MouseReport