Do you know of any built-in (or extension) method to recognize when the mouse pointer is passing over one of a group of cvn rectangles (without necessarily pushing buttons?)

Also, any means of turning off (or diverting) the normal response to a mouse-button push, ie so that these could be used as 'sustain pedal' and/or 'louder/softer' or 'up-to-the-next'/'down-to-the-next' controls?

(ie I'm putting together a design in which I want the mouse pointer to select a particular note-name, playing that note in the octave immediately above or below the last note played. There'd be clusters of cvn's in different colors, each arranged to facilitate playing in a particular key -- and each positioned near the most convenient modulation possibilities.)

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you can use iemguts' receivecanvas or Cyclone's MouseState, then just use boolean logic to figure out if you're in the right region

That is how [mouse_region] does its more limited thing (mouse position within a region if you're clicking & dragging inside.) But [cursor] seems good enough for mouse coordinants and button states.

What I found really helpful this time was you pointing me to a patch from iemguts -- because that got me looking through other patches there for something that might read an object's position more directly. And that led -- AHA! -- to their [canvasselect] and [canvasobjectposition] which both look promising.

Given mouse coordinants, an external using this would check something like
x mod 20 > 10 AND y mod 20 > 10 to recognize a grid of rectangles whenever the mouse pointer would be within the borders of one. & similar conditionals to leave empty rows in the grid, horizontal, vertical, or diagonal...

(Once your external knows you're within one of the set, determining which one could be pretty fast.)

Then (in writing the patch) you'd duplicate a 10X10 cvn (say) and use [canvasobjectposition] to move one of that set to each of those locations, to mark it. (Label & color it appropriately once you've got it in place.) Left-clicking on a cvn doesn't intrinsically do anything so your external could respond however you specified.

There's still that pesky right mouse-button. How best to disable that canvas 'properties - open - help' menu for the duration?

With linux, with a 2-tail mouse, the mouse-derangement part of this turns out to be simple, without having to learn tcl or anything so drastic.

When you're wanting to use pd [or anything] without right mouse-button interference you open a terminal and enter:
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 3 2"
and the mouse output remains available via

[cursor]
|
[route motion buttons]
| |
[route x y] [route 1 2 3 ]

except that your right button events are now coming out outlet 2.

When you want all your buttons working again
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 " returns the mouse to normal.

Hi forrest

I was searching through this forum and came across this thread. While I was looking (in vain) for something similar to you to simulate buttons.

I checked out hcs/mouse-region, iemguts/receivecanvas and iemguts/canvasposition and used the idea as a base for click-region. see click-region-subpatched.pd

I then decided to make something a bit more ambitious using it, a matrix similar to the one in Close Encounters of Third Kind, that outputs midi notes when clicked.

However when I opened my quick and dirty ce-synth.pd to get some sound I found the mouse movement badly interfered with the sound.

I can open a second instance of pd-extended and open ce-synth.pd and that seems to work, but thats not really what want.

Did you find an answer to your post?

http://www.pdpatchrepo.info/hurleur/click-region.zip