Mouse position using jQuery outside of events

Question

I need to get a hold of the absolute mouse position / coordinates (X and Y) using (preferably) jQuery like in this tutorial but outside of any JavaScript event. Thank you.

Answer 1

Not possible. You can however use the same approach in the tutorial to store the position in a global variable and read it outside the event.

Like this:

jQuery(document).ready(function(){
   $().mousemove(function(e){
      window.mouseXPos = e.pageX;
      window.mouseYPos = e.pageY;
   }); 
})

You can now use window.mouseXPos and window.mouseYPos from anywhere.

Answer 2

This started as a comment on Chetan Sastry's answer, but I realized it also might be worth posting as an answer:

I'd be careful about having a document-level, always-running mousemove event, even if you're only polling for cursor position. This is a lot of processing and can bog down any browser, particularly slower ones like IE.

A problem like this almost certainly raises the question of design decision: if you don't need to handle a mouse event to poll for the cursor position, do you really need the cursor position? Is there a better way to solve the problem you're trying to solve?

Edit: even in Safari 4, which is (understatement) very fast, that single mousemove event makes every interaction with that tutorial page noticeably choppy for me. Think about how that will affect users' perceptions of your site or application.