ScreenMouseRotate - Screen and mouse rotation / invert screen and mouse

06/13/2009 - 20:36
Etc/GMT

Once in a while I rotate the screen on my Sony Vaio P, as shown in this image from pocketables:

On Windows machines with Intel graphics you can press Control+Alt+Arrow Key to rotate in one of four orientations depending on which arrow key is pressed. However, the mouse doesn't rotate with the screen. This always bugs me a bit when the occasion arises to use the mouse. There is the Sakasa Mouse program to rotate the mouse, but it's not nicely integrated with the rotate function.

Consequently, I wrote my own little program to rotate the mouse while also rotating the screen. It should work on most computers, not just the Vaio P. I also tested it on my Lenovo X61T and it should not rotate mouse coordinates if the pen or touch screen is activated (at least for a Wacom, I think. Not sure about others since I don't have anything else to test it out on). Here is a zip file of the program:

Unzip and double-click to run. You need .NET installed to run it, which most people already have installed. It will run the app in the system tray and I think usage will be pretty obvious (right-click the icon in the system tray). If you like you could put a shortcut to the app in your startup folder if you want it to automatically start up.

If you're interested, source code is also available:

It is written in C# and uses Mouse Hook code by George Mamaladze:
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/globalhook.aspx.

Brilliant. Thank you.

Brilliant. Thank you.

Hey, your little app is

Hey, your little app is amazing, it's simple but sooo valuable! I was looking for something like that for ages, thanks a lot for implementing it!
A tiny idea for a next release, if you desire... you could also rotate the cursor keys, which would make scrolling in ebooks a little easier. But that's just an idea, the tool is already perfect and as said, very valuable! thanks

Thanks, great idea about the

Thanks, great idea about the cursor keys! That should be doable with the keyboard hook...I will think about it :)

Is there something special I

Is there something special I need to do for Vista to get it to work? I've got a Gateway desktop running on win vista

Hmm, there shouldn't be

Hmm, there shouldn't be anything special, although why would you want to rotate the desktop screen? It might only work with Intel graphics cards, I'm not sure...