PointerEvent

Baseline Widely available *

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since ⁨July 2020⁩.

* Some parts of this feature may have varying levels of support.

ThePointerEvent interface represents the state of a DOM event produced by a pointer such as the geometry of the contact point, the device type that generated the event, the amount of pressure that was applied on the contact surface, etc.

Apointer is a hardware agnostic representation of input devices (such as a mouse, pen or contact point on a touch-enable surface). The pointer can target a specific coordinate (or set of coordinates) on the contact surface such as a screen.

A pointer'shit test is the process a browser uses to determine the target element for a pointer event. Typically, this is determined by considering the pointer's location and also the visual layout of elements in a document on screen media.

Constructors

PointerEvent(): Creates a synthetic—and untrusted—PointerEvent.

Instance properties

This interface inherits properties fromMouseEvent andEvent.

PointerEvent.altitudeAngleRead only: Represents the angle between a transducer (a pointer or stylus) axis and the X-Y plane of a device screen.
PointerEvent.azimuthAngleRead only: Represents the angle between the Y-Z plane and the plane containing both the transducer (a pointer or stylus) axis and the Y axis.
PointerEvent.persistentDeviceIdRead only: A unique identifier for the pointing device generating thePointerEvent.
PointerEvent.pointerIdRead only: A unique identifier for the pointer causing the event.
PointerEvent.widthRead only: The width (magnitude on the X axis), in CSS pixels, of the contact geometry of the pointer.
PointerEvent.heightRead only: The height (magnitude on the Y axis), in CSS pixels, of the contact geometry of the pointer.
PointerEvent.pressureRead only: The normalized pressure of the pointer input in the range0 to1, where0 and1 represent the minimum and maximum pressure the hardware is capable of detecting, respectively.
PointerEvent.tangentialPressureRead only: The normalized tangential pressure of the pointer input (also known as barrel pressure orcylinder stress) in the range-1 to1, where0 is the neutral position of the control.
PointerEvent.tiltXRead only: The plane angle (in degrees, in the range of-90 to90) between the Y–Z plane and the plane containing both the pointer (e.g., pen stylus) axis and the Y axis.
PointerEvent.tiltYRead only: The plane angle (in degrees, in the range of-90 to90) between the X–Z plane and the plane containing both the pointer (e.g., pen stylus) axis and the X axis.
PointerEvent.twistRead only: The clockwise rotation of the pointer (e.g., pen stylus) around its major axis in degrees, with a value in the range0 to359.
PointerEvent.pointerTypeRead only: Indicates the device type that caused the event (mouse, pen, touch, etc.).
PointerEvent.isPrimaryRead only: Indicates if the pointer represents the primary pointer of this pointer type.

Instance methods

PointerEvent.getCoalescedEvents()Secure context: Returns a sequence of allPointerEvent instances that were coalesced into the dispatchedpointermove event.
PointerEvent.getPredictedEvents(): Returns a sequence ofPointerEvent instances that the browser predicts will follow the dispatchedpointermove event's coalesced events.

Pointer event types

ThePointerEvent interface has several event types. To determine which event fired, look at the event'stype property.

Note:It's important to note that in many cases, both pointer and mouse events get sent (in order to let non-pointer-specific code still interact with the user). If you use pointer events, you should callpreventDefault() to keep the mouse event from being sent as well.

pointerover: This event is fired when a pointing device is moved into an element's hit test boundaries.
pointerenter: This event is fired when a pointing device is moved into the hit test boundaries of an element or one of its descendants, including as a result of apointerdown event from a device that does not support hover (seepointerdown). This event type is similar topointerover, but differs in that it does not bubble.
pointerdown: The event is fired when a pointer becomesactive. For mouse, it is fired when the device transitions from no buttons pressed to at least one button pressed. For touch, it is fired when physical contact is made with the digitizer. For pen, it is fired when the stylus makes physical contact with the digitizer.
Note:For touchscreen browsers that allowdirect manipulation, apointerdown event triggersimplicit pointer capture, which causes the target to capture all subsequent pointer events as if they were occurring over the capturing target. Accordingly,pointerover,pointerenter,pointerleave, andpointeroutwill not fire as long as this capture is set. The capture can be released manually by callingelement.releasePointerCapture on the target element, or it will be implicitly released after apointerup orpointercancel event.
pointermove: This event is fired when a pointer changes coordinates.
pointerrawupdateExperimental: This event is fired when any of a pointer's properties change.
pointerup: This event is fired when a pointer is no longeractive.
pointercancel: A browser fires this event if it concludes the pointer will no longer be able to generate events (for example the related device is deactivated).
pointerout: This event is fired for several reasons including: pointing device is moved out of the hit test boundaries of an element; firing thepointerup event for a device that does not support hover (seepointerup); after firing thepointercancel event (seepointercancel); when a pen stylus leaves the hover range detectable by the digitizer.
pointerleave: This event is fired when a pointing device is moved out of the hit test boundaries of an element. For pen devices, this event is fired when the stylus leaves the hover range detectable by the digitizer.
gotpointercapture: This event is fired when an element receives pointer capture.
lostpointercapture: This event is fired after pointer capture is released for a pointer.