Get mouse wheel events in jQuery?

Question

Is there a way to get the mouse wheel events (not talking about scroll events) in jQuery?

Answer 1

Answers talking about "mousewheel" event are refering to a deprecated event. The standard event is simply "wheel". See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Reference/Events/wheel

Answer 2

There's a plugin that detects up/down mouse wheel and velocity over a region.

Answer 3

If using mentioned jquery mousewheel plugin, then what about to use the 2nd argument of event handler function - delta:

$('#my-element').on('mousewheel', function(event, delta) {
    if(delta > 0) {
    console.log('scroll up');
    } 
    else {
    console.log('scroll down');
    }
});

Answer 4

Binding to both mousewheel and DOMMouseScroll ended up working really well for me:

$(window).bind('mousewheel DOMMouseScroll', function(event){
    if (event.originalEvent.wheelDelta > 0 || event.originalEvent.detail < 0) {
        // scroll up
    }
    else {
        // scroll down
    }
});

This method is working in IE9+, Chrome 33, and Firefox 27.

---

Edit - Mar 2016

I decided to revisit this issue since it's been a while. The MDN page for the scroll event has a great way of retrieving the scroll position that makes use of requestAnimationFrame, which is highly preferable to my previous detection method. I modified their code to provide better compatibility in addition to scroll direction and position:

(function() {
  var supportOffset = window.pageYOffset !== undefined,
    lastKnownPos = 0,
    ticking = false,
    scrollDir,
    currYPos;

  function doSomething(scrollPos, scrollDir) {
    // Your code goes here...
    console.log('scroll pos: ' + scrollPos + ' | scroll dir: ' + scrollDir);
  }

  window.addEventListener('wheel', function(e) {
    currYPos = supportOffset ? window.pageYOffset : document.body.scrollTop;
    scrollDir = lastKnownPos > currYPos ? 'up' : 'down';
    lastKnownPos = currYPos;

    if (!ticking) {
      window.requestAnimationFrame(function() {
        doSomething(lastKnownPos, scrollDir);
        ticking = false;
      });
    }
    ticking = true;
  });
})();

See the Pen Vanilla JS Scroll Tracking by Jesse Dupuy (@blindside85) on CodePen.

This code is currently working in Chrome v50, Firefox v44, Safari v9, and IE9+

References:

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/scroll
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Events/wheel

Answer 5

The plugin that @DarinDimitrov posted, jquery-mousewheel, is broken with jQuery 3+. It would be more advisable to use jquery-wheel which works with jQuery 3+.

If you don't want to go the jQuery route, MDN highly cautions using the mousewheel event as it's nonstandard and unsupported in many places. It instead says that you should use the wheel event as you get much more specificity over exactly what the values you're getting mean. It's supported by most major browsers.

Answer 6

use this code

 knob.bind('mousewheel', function(e){  
 if(e.originalEvent.wheelDelta < 0) {
    moveKnob('down');
  } else {
    moveKnob('up');
 }
  return false;
});