Detecting the type of mouse click

There are many ways for a user to interact with application using a mouse, there are normal click (single left click) that often selects the object, single right click that often opens up a context menu, and double-left click that often opens up the object. The ability to detect the type of the mouse click will come in handy when you are developing a truly interactive GUI. Fortunately, such information can be easily obtained by extracting the information stored in the SelectionType property of the GUI, which is a figure object.

1. Create a blank GUI and save the files.

2. Create a function to be attached to the WindowButtonDownFcn property of the GUI.


function winButtonDownFcn(hObject, eventData) 
m_type = get(hObject, 'selectionType');
if strcmp(m_type, 'normal')
    fprintf('left mouse click\n');
elseif strcmp(m_type, 'alt')
    fprintf('right mouse click\n'); 
elseif strcmp(m_type, 'open')
    fprintf('double-click\n');
end

3. In the opening function of the GUI, attach the function to the WindowButtonDownFcn property of the GUI.

set(hObject, 'windowButtonDownFcn', @winButtonDownFcn);

4. Running the GUI and try out different type of mouse clicks, the corresponding detection should be printed in the command window.

Note that there are other mouse clicks and/or key pressed may result in the same values in the selectionType property, for example, Control+left click will show up as a right click. If you would like to implement the more complicated mouse clicks (with key pressed), be sure to check the table in the documentation.

Example can be download here.