Draw straght line.

[towlerg]

I've been looking for a utility the will force mouse moves to either horizontal and vertical. Shouldn't be too tough, each time you get a mouse move you reset either x or y to it's start value. A nice addon to that would be to draw a straight line at an arbitrary angle. Anybody know of such a beast?

[shantanu@india]

In drawing softwares like AutoCAD just press F8 for orthogonal mouse movement.
Are you talking about the entire screen of Windows?

[towlerg]

I was hoping to find a utiliy for use with several applications.

[keytapper]

In Linux there's the way to move the mouse by the keyboard input. Maybe some good fellow has ported this feature on Windows.

[towlerg]

Actually I think it already exists in Win but rely's on keyboard number pad and it's kindda clunky anyway.

[Parmin]

Mouse data packets have distinct location feedback for each axis of movement.
By parsing the packet and changing the singular axis data to 0 between the mouse and the computer, you can lock the input of a particular axis and in essence force it to draw a straight line either in the horizontal or vertical direction.

Below is the "older" style mouse data packet.
they came in 3 bytes of data

        D7      D6      D5      D4      D3      D2      D1      D0
 
1.      X       1       LB      RB      Y7      Y6      X7      X6
2.      X       0       X5      X4      X3      X2      X1      X0     
3.      X       0       Y5      Y4      Y3      Y2      Y1      Y0

LB is the state of the left button (1 means pressed down)
RB is the state of the right button (1 means pressed down)
X7-X0 movement in X direction since last packet (signed byte)
Y7-Y0 movement in Y direction since last packet (signed byte)
     

[towlerg]

Thanks Parmin, I think I know how to do it (apart from the line between to points) I was kindda hoping someone had already done it.