Is there a way to turn on and off the Mouse Keys feature using AppleScript or a terminal command?
Here's the GUI scripting solution:
tell application "System Preferences"
reveal anchor "Mouse" of pane id "com.apple.preference.universalaccess"
tell application "System Events"
tell process "System Preferences"
tell first window
tell first tab group
tell radio group 1
if value of radio button 1 is 1 then
# enabled, so disable
click radio button 2
else
# disabled, so enable
click radio button 1
end if
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
end tell
quit
end tell
It will launch System Preferences if required, but doesn't show the window and quits it afterwards, so from a UI POV, it at least doesn't show the window.
You can change the persistent setting on which the System Preferences configuration is based using the following commands:
defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriver -bool YES
defaults write ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.universalaccess mouseDriver -bool NO
Unfortunately, this only changes the configuration file and does not apply the changes to the running system.
While you can programmatically press Option keys using AppleScript, like the following:
tell application "System Events"
key down option
key up option
end tell
The press Option five times to toggle setting is at a higher level and doesn't get triggered by this. While all regular Option
key presses are ignored after you only run key down option
, you can still toggle Mouse Keys.
Debugging System Preferences while changing the setting shows calls to LaunchUAServerIfNeeded
and UAMouseKeysSetEnabled
in the private UniversalAccessCore
framework. Unless we reverse engineer that framework and write our own binaries, I don't think we'll get a proper programmatic way to do this.