Get the current position of the mouse from a JavaScript event

Would you like to be able to open a modal, or a context menu? Maybe you are making a browser game, or simply adding a sparkly trail to your mouse. To do all of these things you need to know the current mouse position relative to the screen.

This simple problem was something I found myself googling fairly often when I was new to coding. I would usually include some catch like ‘get the current mouse position without using an event’. As far as I’m aware it isn’t possible to get the current mouse position without triggering a mouse event.

So how can we get the mouse position from a mouse event?

Getting the current X and Y coordinates from an event

To get the current mouse position we are going to trigger a mouse event. In this case we will use ‘mousemove’ to log the current X and Y coordinates of the mouse to the console. For a more detailed list of mouse events you could have a read of this.

First we set up an event listener for our event:

document.addEventListener('mousemove', (event) => {
	
});

Now we can access our event object to get the client X and Y coordinates and log them to the console using string interpolation:

document.addEventListener('mousemove', (event) => {
	console.log(`Mouse X: ${event.clientX}, Mouse Y: ${event.clientY}`);
});

As a result, if you now open your console you will see that every time you move the mouse there will be a log of the mouse coordinates ‘helpfully’ spammed all over your screen.