How do I swap primary and secondary mouse buttons from the command line or by using a hotkey without rebooting or compiling a program?

Question

My eight-year-old son is left-handed and I am right-handed. I wish to be able to quickly and easily switch primary and secondary mouse buttons from the command line. We use Windows 10. I found this, which provides c and C#* solutions. I found this which provides a solution which does require rebooting, and also provides a link to the Stack Overflow answer. However, it seems to me that this should be possible to do without resorting to a compiled language. I would be happy with a solution using PowerShell, Python, Perl, a nircmd utility, etc., but I'd rather not resort to a compiled language.

Thank you for your help.

FYI if you're interested: the language name apparently uses the "#" (U+0023 # NUMBER SIGN) character, not the "♯" (U+266F ♯ MUSIC SHARP SIGN) character, even though its name is pronounced C Sharp. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_Sharp_(programming_language)#Name.

Edit: Changed question to add "...or by using a hotkey...", since I ultimately wanted to do this with an Autohotkey hotkey; it turns out that Autohotkey can do the swap itself. I was assuming that the answer would be e.g. a Powershell script, which I would invoke by using an Autohotkey hotkey. See the accepted answer.

Would you be ok with an AutoHotkey script. Would be pretty easy to make a toggle function. — Confuzing, Aug 24 '17 at 19:59
I have never done this, and I don't know powershell well, but look at `DLLImport` and see, for example, ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24391367 ). Put that together with the info from your C# example. I have seen examples of VBS windows API hacks where you automate excel by attaching a temp function, but that is hairy IMO — Yorik, Aug 24 '17 at 21:24
Confuzing, Autohotkey would be fine. I use it for a lot (for example, while composing this question I modified my normal script so that I can type ";sharp" and it will insert a sharp symbol). I did not know that Autohotkey could do this. I can probably figure it out myself at this point. Thank you very much — ludinom, Aug 24 '17 at 21:59
Yorick, thank you very much. I will probably go the AHK route. — ludinom, Aug 24 '17 at 22:01
I don't quite understand the difference between using a compiled language and running nircmd (which was written in a compiled language)... — u1686_grawity, Aug 25 '17 at 13:52
grawity, thank you for your request for clarification. I don't use C#, and I don't currently use C (or C++), and I do not care to set up a C or C# compiler just for this. Doing so would certainly be an option, but since there are simpler ways to do this without requiring a compiler I would prefer that. In fact, although I asked for a way to do this from the command line, I would have then set up an Autohotkey hotkey to call that command line; it turns out that Autohotkey can perform the swap itself. I hope this clarifies my preference. — ludinom, Aug 25 '17 at 21:11

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 25 '17 at 13:49

3

Here is what I came up with for AHK. Just toggles rebinding the mouse buttons with ctrl+alt+m

swap:
swap=false

^!m::
    swap := !swap 

#if !swap
    RButton::LButton
    LButton::RButton

answered Aug 25 '17 at 13:49

Confuzing

551
2
9

Thanks a lot! I hadn't had a chance to get back to this and write it myself, but you saved me the trouble. Sorry to put you to the trouble, I could have figured it out once you pointed me in the direction of AHK. I dropped this into my standard AHK script which runs at startup, used a different key (I normally use ^#! for my AHK hotkeys, but ^#!m is already used by Remember the Milk, so I used ^#!s, for swap) and it works great. I'm sorry I can't upvote; or rather, I upvoted but it doesn't count, because I have <15 reputation, so my opinion is recorded but not displayed. – ludinom Aug 25 '17 at 20:57
@Confuzing, very nice solution. Only one question, it's always started as left handed, do you know how to make it start as right handed by default. I was trying to change `swap=false`, but that doesn't help. Thanks! – electroid Oct 07 '18 at 15:14
1

@electroid Changing swap to true should have worked. But you could change the '#if !swap' to '#if swap', or probably even easier to just reverse them in Windows mouse settings. – Confuzing Oct 07 '18 at 15:58
@Confuzing, your solution change the `#if !swap` to `#if swap` working just fine! Thanks! – electroid Oct 07 '18 at 17:54

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 10 '18 at 20:20

This is the answer, which was posted on https://superuser.com/a/1357020/790554.

This is the Autohotkey version (modified/based on https://github.com/jNizM/AHK_DllCall_WinAPI/blob/master/src/Mouse%20Input%20Functions/SwapMouseButton.ahk).

; autohotkey code - mapped to F12
F12::
    buttonState := DllCall("user32.dll\SwapMouseButton", "UInt", 1)
    if buttonState <> 0
    {
        buttonState := DllCall("user32.dll\SwapMouseButton", "UInt", 0)
    }

This works fine with all Windows (including Windows 10). I usually map it to a hotkey such as "F12" key on my keyboard (using Autohotkey), and I can toggle between left and right mouse button instantly with press of a key.

How do I swap primary and secondary mouse buttons from the command line or by using a hotkey without rebooting or compiling a program?

2 Answers2