global-input-tracker

Cross-platform global mouse and keyboard event tracker for Node.js using Rust and napi-rs.

✨ Features

• 🔁 Real-time global keyboard & mouse event tracking
• ⚡ Built in Rust for speed and low overhead
• 🔌 Native Node.js addon via napi-rs
• 💻 Supports Windows, macOS, Linux (X11)

🚀 Installation

npm install global-input-tracker

yarn add global-input-tracker

Support matrix

Operating Systems

| | node14 | node16 | node18 | | ---------------- | ------ | ------ | ------ | | Windows x64 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Windows x32 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Windows arm64 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | macOS x64 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | macOS arm64 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Linux x64 gnu | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Linux x64 musl | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | Linux arm gnu | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Linux arm64 gnu | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Linux arm64 musl | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Android arm64 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | Android armv7 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | | FreeBSD x64 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |

Ability

Global Input Tracking

• Monitor all keyboard presses and releases across the system
• Track mouse movements globally, even outside your app window
• Detect mouse button presses and releases

🔄 Cross-Platform Support

• Works on macOS, Linux (GNU + MUSL), and FreeBSD
• Node.js runtime support: Node 14+, 16+, 18+

🔌 Efficient Native Performance

• Powered by Rust and rdev for low-latency input detection
• Uses napi-rs for safe and efficient FFI to Node.js

🧩 Structured Event Data

• Returns rich InputEvent objects including:
  • event_type (e.g., KeyDown, MouseMove)
  • payload (e.g., KeyA, LeftButton)
  • x, y mouse coordinates (when applicable)

👂 Background Event Listener

• Runs in a background thread without blocking the main Node.js event loop
• Designed for real-time, asynchronous input handling

🛠 TypeScript Friendly

• Auto-generated TypeScript types
• Easy to use in both JavaScript and TypeScript environments

🧪 Run Example

To test the module locally with an example script:

node examples/main.mjs