TheWiggler

This is a small Qt / QML / C++ application that moves your mouse to prevent screensavers and auto locking. It is moderately configurable via a QML UI but typically you can run it with the default settings.

Currently, it builds on Windows, macOS and Ubuntu and releases for each can be found on the releases page.

Build instructions

Qt is the main dependency and can be downloaded for free from https://www.qt.io.

For Windows users you will also need Visual Studio 2017 installed if you are using the latest Qt release (5.14.2).
For macOS users you will need XCode which the Qt installer should prompt you to install if it is missing.
For Linux users users you will need an X11 environment and on Ubuntu specifically the following additional packages installed: build-essential and either libgl-dev or libgl-mesa-dev depending on your Ubuntu version. If you intend to deploy the application Ubuntu 16.04 is recommended as currently this is the version of Ubuntu the deployment tool works on.

Once the dependencies are installed you should be able to open the project in Qt Creator and build / run it.

Currently, the build has only been tested on Windows 10, macOS High Sierra 10.13 and Ubuntu 16.04 + 20.04.

Deployment instructions

Once you have built a release version of the application you may wish to deploy so it can be run on other machines by collecting all the shared library dependencies.

Windows deployment

For Windows deployment you can use the windeployqt.exe which is found in the Qt install directory. For example:

C:/Qt/5.14.0/msvc2016_64/bin/windeployqt.exe

Simply run this tool using the following parameters:

./windeployqt.exe {path-to-build-folder}\TheWiggler.exe --qmldir {path-to-repo-root}\TheWiggler

This will copy all the dependencies required to run TheWiggler.exe on any machine into the folder containing TheWiggler.exe.

macOS deployment

For OSX deployment you can use the macdeployqt tool found in the Qt install directory. For example:

$HOME/Qt/5.14.2/clang_64/bin/macdeployqt

Simply run this tool using the following parameters:

./macdeployqt {path-to-build-folder}\TheWiggler.app -qmldir={path-to-repo-root}\TheWiggler

This will pack your .app file with all the required Qt framework dependencies required to run the app on any machine.

Ubuntu deployment

For Ubuntu deployment you can use the unoffical linuxdeployqt tool available from https://github.com/probonopd/linuxdeployqt.

For compatibility reasons this tool is maintained such that it only works on the current oldest Ubuntu LTS release (currently 16.04), thus you should use Ubuntu 16.04 for both building and deployment if deployment is your goal.

Obtain and download the linuxdeployqt app image from the linuxdeployqt github release page
Export your Qt binary folder so the Qt build tools are available from the command line. For example:

export PATH=~/Qt/5.14.2/gcc_64/:$PATH

Run the linuxdeployqt tool using the following parameters:

./linuxdeployqt {path-to-build-folder}\TheWiggler -qmldir={absolute-path-to-repo-root}\TheWiggler

Note: For some reason the current version of linuxdeployqt does not appear to work if the qmldir path specified is not an absolute path.

This will copy all the dependencies required to run TheWiggler on any machine into the folder containing TheWiggler.

Known issues

On Ubuntu VM guests under Virtual Box you must disable Input->Mouse Integration otherwise the mouse cannot be programmatically moved.