To get the cursor position in JavaScript, we can use the MouseEvent client properties, that is the clientX Property and the clientY Property.
event.clientX
event.clientYTo get the cursor position we will need to attach a mouse event to either a div on the page or to the whole page document itself. We will need to attach a function to that event, and then use the function to get the position of the cursor.
A good event to use to get the position of the cursor is the onmousemove event. Whenever a user moves their mouse on the specified element, the onmousemove event will be triggered. We can then call a function, and the important part, we will pass in a parameter to the function, that will contain information about our cursor.
Here is the HTML setup we can use for the first part of getting the cursor position.
<body onmousemove="getCursorPosition(event)"></body>
As you can see in the code above, we attach the function getCusorPosition and pass it a parameter we call event. We will use this in the next and final part below.
function getCursorPosition(event) {
var xCursorPosition = event.clientX;
var yCursorPosition = event.clientY;
}As we can see from the code above in our function, we take the parameter that has been passed to us called event and get the properties clientX and clientY of it.
We put these together to get the cursor position. Let’s take a look at this in action below.
How to Get and Display the Cursor Position in JavaScript
In this example, we will create a div that takes up a section of the page. We will then add the onmousemove event to the div to run a function to help us get the X and Y coordinates of the cursor. The user will have to move their mouse in this div for us to get this information.
Finally, we will have two divs below where we can display the x and y positions of our cursor to the user.
Here is the HTML set up:
<style>#div1 { height: 300px; width:98%; border: 1px solid #444; position: relative; }</style>
<div id="div1" onmousemove="getCursorPosition(event)">
</div>
<div class="cursor-position">The X cursor position is: <span id="cursor-position-x"></span>. </div>
<div class="cursor-position">The Y cursor position is: <span id="cursor-position-y"></span>. </div>
In our function getCursorPosition, we will use the parameter that has been passed to us to get the x and y coordinates of the cursor. To get the x coordinate of the cursor, we will use the clientX property. To get the y coordinate of the cursor, we will use the clientY property.
We will finally use the textContent property to display the results to the user.
And that’s it. Here is the JavaScript code:
Here is the code:
function getCursorPosition(event) {
document.getElementById("cursor-position-x").textContent = event.clientX;
document.getElementById("cursor-position-y").textContent = event.clientY;
}
The final code and output for this example is below:
Code Output:
Full Code:
<style>#div1 { height: 300px; width:98%; border: 1px solid #444; position: relative; }</style>
<div id="div1" onmousemove="getCursorPosition(event)">
</div>
<div class="cursor-position">The X cursor position is: <span id="cursor-position-x"></span>. </div>
<div class="cursor-position">The Y cursor position is: <span id="cursor-position-y"></span>. </div>
<script>
function getCursorPosition(event) {
document.getElementById("cursor-position-x").textContent = event.clientX;
document.getElementById("cursor-position-y").textContent = event.clientY;
}
</script>
Hopefully this article has helped you understand tow to get the cursor position in JavaScript.
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