This tool was designed to track how many times each mouse button has been clicked. This is useful if you want to know how long a specific mouse lasts before exhibiting problems (e.g. bouncing of buttons).
While there are already some programs that do this, they are usually quite heavy and not very efficient. Some use a full-blown SQL-based database for storing data about each click, which massively increases storage requirements and reduces the lifespan of the storage medium.
This script simply internally counts mouse clicks and appends a single line of JSON Data to a log file once every hour. A new log file is created monthly to make it easier to back up and process them.
This tool uses Xlib, which means that it will only work under X-based linux installs.
If there is demand, I may port this to wayland.
Additionally, Python 3.7 or newer is required. Python 3.6 may also work, but is not officially supported.
Clone this repo to a folder of your choice and enter it:
$ git clone https://github.com/not-na/mousestats.git
$ cd mousestats
Next, create a virtualenv to install the requirements into:
$ python3 -mvenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
Once you have installed mousestats, you can start it from anywhere by running the
launch.sh script:
$ bash launch.sh
You can exit it by pressing Ctrl+C in the terminal window or by killing the process from your task manager.
Usually, you don't want to have to manually start mousestats on every boot. Thus, we
should add it to the user-local autostart.
To do this, use whatever autostart mechanism your distribution provides
(e.g. "Startup Application" on Ubuntu) to launch the launch.sh script. Other parameters
should not matter.
By default, statistical data is stored in ~/.local/share/mousestats in files per-month.
The statistic files follow the JSONL standard, e.g. a single JSON object on a line. Each line contains up to an hour of data, usually less for the first hour that the script runs.
On the first mouse click in a new hour, the data of the old hour is written out. If the tool is killed, it also writes out the data. In rare cases, this may cause multiple data sets to be present for every hour, if the script is restarted several times in a short timeframe.
Take a look at the produced data files to see the exact format.
Run the script analyze.py to show some statistics:
$ python analyze.py
Currently, monthly, yearly and overall sums are shown per-button. Also, a rough estimate of expected mouse life is given.