willkrakow / click-tricks

A handful of useful CLI tools to make it look like you're working when you actually aren't. Inspired by my friend Sam.

Emulate mouse events with macOS

With caffeinate

1. Open a new Terminal window
2. Type caffeinate -u -t 3600
3. Hit enter

This will emulate user activity on the computer for 1 hour (3600 seconds). To cancel the process, just hit ctrl+c. However, caffeinate is intended to prevent your Mac from going to sleep, so it might not register with whatever software your company is using to monitor activity. In that case....

With cliclick

First, you need to get Homebrew, a package manager for macOS. Basically Homebrew lets you install packages from the command line and takes care of software dependencies, installation locations and package updates.

Installing Homebrew

1. Open a new Terminal window
2. Paste the following line: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
3. Hit enter

Installing cliclick

Once you have Homebrew installed, run the following command: brew install cliclick

You'll see a bunch of output as Homebrew installs the package.

Running cliclick

Once Homebrew has done its thing, type the following into your Terminal the following (hit Enter after each line):

for i in {0..3600}
do
cliclick -w 1000 c:100,500
done

This will emulate a mouse click every second at the (100, 500) coordinate on your screen.

Clicking in a pattern

If you want to get fancy, you can also do something like this:

for i in {0..1200}
do
cliclick -w 3000 c:$i, $i
done

The above script will click in a diagonal line across your screen, with 3 seconds in between each click.

Emulating keypresses

for i in {0..3600}
do
cliclick -w 1000 t:H
sleep 5
cliclick key:delete
done

The above script will wait 1 second, type an "H", wait 5 seconds, delete the H, wait 1 second, and then repeat the process.

More possibilities

See the full list of cliclick options.

References:

Homebrew
caffeinate
cliclick
Bash scripting