AutoMouseMove
Your computer no longer sleeps, and your colleagues stop believing you are absent.
AutoMouseMove moves your cursor a few pixels, at the interval you choose. Enough for Windows, macOS, or Linux to consider that something is happening. Discreet enough for you to completely forget about it. The application lives in the taskbar, consumes almost nothing, and doesn't ask you for anything once set up.
The problem I wanted to solve
I wrote this software for myself, one evening when my screen turned off for the third time while I was reading a twenty-page report. You don't touch the mouse for ten minutes, and the machine concludes that you are gone. Worse: Teams and Slack announce it to the whole team. You are there, working, and a yellow dot tells the opposite.
There are two bad ways to fix this. Extend the sleep delay in the system settings, and leave the screen on all night the day you forget to turn it back on. Or place an object on a key on the keyboard, which I have actually seen done in an office. AutoMouseMove is the third option: you activate it, forget about it, and turn it off with a click when you leave.
Ten pixels, and nothing more
At each interval, AutoMouseMove moves the cursor down ten pixels, then brings it back to the next position. That's it. No clicks, no keyboard strokes, no macro that would click in your windows while your back is turned.
The movement goes through SharpHook and its call SimulateMouseMovementRelative, which addresses the event injection interface of each system, the same one used by accessibility tools. Nothing exotic, nothing that tinkers with another program's memory.
- Adjustable interval from 1 to 60 minutes, 3 minutes by default.
- A timer displays the time elapsed since the last movement.
- A checkbox stops the timer without leaving the application.
- The movement is relative: your cursor never jumps to the other end of the screen.
Windows, macOS, and Linux, with their real limits
The software is written once, in .NET 9 with Avalonia, and runs as is on all three systems. What follows is not a brochure: these are the three real cases, including the one that doesn't work.
Windows 10 and 11
Nothing special to do. You unzip, you launch, the icon appears next to the clock. The only additional step concerns the SmartScreen warning, explained just below.
macOS 15 and above
At the first movement, macOS requests Accessibility permission. It must be granted in System Preferences, otherwise the software does nothing at all, and it does so silently. The packages are signed and notarized by Apple, so there is no alert screen at launch.
Linux x64
Works under X11 and XWayland, so on Ubuntu and Fedora desktops as they are delivered. A strict Wayland session, however, prohibits event injection to any application: this is not a flaw of the software, it's a limitation of the system layer, and no tool of this type bypasses it.
And also
An icon, not a window
The application starts directly in the notification area. Closing the window minimizes it instead of quitting the program.
Start with the session
A checkbox, and the software launches at login, using the native mechanism of each of the three systems.
Reported updates
At launch, the application checks if a newer version exists and offers to fetch it. It never installs anything behind your back.
No ads, no tracking
No banner, nothing that can be resold. Your settings are stored in a readable file, %APPDATA%/AutoMouseMove/preferences.json.
Install on Windows without fighting with SmartScreen
I do not pay for a Windows signing certificate, which costs several hundred euros per year for software at this price. Result: Windows displays a warning at the first launch, just like for any unsigned program. Here’s how to proceed, it takes ten seconds.
- Download the archive
AutoMouseMove-v1.7.7-win-x64.zipwith the button at the bottom of this page. - Before decompressing it, right-click on the ZIP file, then Properties.
- At the bottom of the window, check Unblock, then confirm.
- Decompress, launch
AutoMouseMove.exe, and you’re done.
If you decompress before unblocking, the mark will be on each extracted file. In this case, delete the folder and start again from the second step: it’s faster than unblocking the files one by one.
There’s nothing else to install
The archives already contain everything needed to run the program: no .NET environment to download separately, no libraries to add. This is also why the files weigh about fifty megabytes. If an old version of this page asked you to install .NET 9, forget it, that’s no longer true.
What has changed in 1.7.7
Two fixes are noticeable from the first minute of use. I made them because they annoyed me too.
Only one instance at a time
Restarting the program while it was already running created a second timer in the background, invisible and completely unnecessary. The second instance now stops by itself, without a window or error message: the one already in the taskbar remains in control.
The trial counter tells the truth
The window announced 30 days remaining at startup, then corrected itself to 28 a few minutes later. It now queries the server before the first display, and updates itself afterwards.
Previous versions of the 1.7 series mainly served to make the software bearable on macOS: no more icon in the Dock, no more empty window at startup, it behaves like a menu bar utility. The details of each version are published further down this page, along with downloads.
Try, then decide
30 days of full trial, no credit card and no blocked features. Then, the "One for All" license unlocks AutoMouseMove and all my other applications, both today's and tomorrow's, under a single subscription. There is no license specific to this software, and that is intentional.
Buy the One for All license Contact me
Compatible with Windows 10 and 11, macOS 15 and above, Linux x64.
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