Mouse pointer and dual monitors

[sanddrag]

Does anyone know of a program that will constrain the mouse pointer to the primary display, and then release it to the secondary based on a gesture (such as hitting the boundary twice within X amount of time)? I always seem to lose my mouse off onto the secondary.

[NickE]

The only thing I can think of is on my Wacom tablet, it can be configured to have a button switch between mapping the tablet to one screen or to both screens.

[AdamHeard]

Assuming you're refering when teh 2nd monitor is physically off/disconnected, but the OS is still running it, Ultramon is a great program I use to handle dual monitors. You can set a hotkey to toggle the 2nd monitor on/off.

Assuming both monitors are on the entire time, why can't you just move the mouse left (or right)?

[sanddrag]

I can easily enable or disable the monitor through ATI Catalyst, but I was hoping for something that would allow me to keep the mouse contained to the primary while both are on.

[Honis]

That is an unusual request. I don't have a solution but you can enable the mouse sonar in windows to speedup finding the pointer (until you get the solution you're looking for).

Control Panel > Mouse > Pointer Options (tab) > Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key (check box)

[sanddrag]

I have found something close to what I am looking for. By repositioning the monitors "1" and "2" in the display properties to be on a diagonal, I can essentially set a narrow pathway that the mouse can travel through between monitors. This lets me keep it on the primary for the most part, but is a little roundabout to get to the secondary. Still would be great to have a double-bump to break through the barrier.

[Qbranch]

sanddrag,

I don't know of one you can find online, but if you have any experience with any of the .NET languages (VB.NET, C#, etc.) you should be able to write a short program to do this for you.

The System.Drawing.Point that holds the mouse pointer position on the screen can be found at System.Windows.Forms.Cursor.Current.Position. Let me know if you need more info on this part.

From there, I would think sampling the cursor position on a fixed interval should be good enough to do the cursor trap on screen 1 and to watch for the 'screen side tap' gesture.

Hope that helps... have fun!

-q


p.s. Note that System.Windows.Forms.Cursor.Current returns the cursor which is currently the system mouse pointer... if you want, this means you may be able to have more than one cursor on the screen at a given time, then have your program switch between them based on some input... might be a fun project sometime