How can I use the back and forward mouse buttons in a Swing application?

Question

The question is pretty simple. I couldn\'t find many links regarding this issue, and the ones I found didn\'t seemed to avoid the real question. My application must handle t

Answer 1

Check if additional mouse buttons are detected by calling:

MouseInfo.getNumberOfButtons();

Check if MouseEvents are fired when you click those additional buttons. If so, what does MouseInfo.getButton() return?

According to the javadocs for MouseInfo.getButton():

If a mouse with five buttons is installed, this method may return the following values:

* 0 (NOBUTTON)
* 1 (BUTTON1)
* 2 (BUTTON2)
* 3 (BUTTON3)
* 4
* 5

Answer 2

how can we distinguish between "back" and "forward" buttons? Can we be sure that button 4 is back and 5 is forward?

I don't use JDK7 and have never heard of back/forward buttons. However I do know that the SwingUtilities class has methods:

isRightMouseButton(MouseEvent)
isLeftMouseButton(MouseEvent) 
isMiddleMouseButton(MouseEvent) 

If back/forward are now supported then I would guess they have added:

isBackMouseButton(MouseEvent)
isForwardMouseButton(MouseEvent) 

Answer 3

Credit belongs to the original responders, just adding a ready-to-use code sample for global back-/forward-button detection in case it helps anyone else (JDK 1.8)

if (Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().areExtraMouseButtonsEnabled() && MouseInfo.getNumberOfButtons() > 3) {
    Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener(event -> {
        if (event instanceof MouseEvent) {
            MouseEvent mouseEvent = (MouseEvent) event;
            if (mouseEvent.getID() == MouseEvent.MOUSE_RELEASED && mouseEvent.getButton() > 3) {
                if (mouseEvent.getButton() == 4) {
                    // back
                } else if (mouseEvent.getButton() == 5) {
                    // forward
                }
            }
        }
    }, AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK);
}

Answer 4

Have a look at MouseEvent.getButton() and Toolkit.areExtraMouseButtonsEnabled().