Portable MouseJiggler executable ran from terminal exits upon closing terminal

[sepsol]

First of all, thanks for creating and maintaining this project and providing it to the public, I really appreciate that!

Yesterday, I noticed something while trying to leave MouseJiggler running on my remote work computer. First of all, let me explain my environment. My computer is a work machine that runs Windows 10 with Windows PowerShell (doesn't have PowerShell 7), that is controlled by IT and I do not have admin rights on it. So, I can't install anything and I have to resort to using portable software. I downloaded the portable version and put it inside a directory and made it hidden to keep it away from the eyes of the IT guys. Now, I didn't want to go through the process of navigating in File Explorer to the MouseJiggler's directory and unhide its directory and run it from there every single time. So, since I usually have a PowerShell terminal open, I figured it'd be a good idea to run the software from there. I didn't want to reference the full executable path every time I wanted to run the software, and I was limited in that I was not able to update the environment variables on my machine. So, I resorted to updating my PowerShell profile with the path to the hidden MouseJiggler's executable, and it worked fine and I could call it from any directory!

The only issue I had with this, is that as soon as I closed the terminal that started the (portable) MouseJiggler process, it also closed the MouseJiggler process. I know this might not be classified as a critical bug from your point of view, but for me it's very unfortunate. I'd really love to be able to run the process from a terminal and don't worry about whether I kept my terminal open or did I close it out of habit, only to later find that my remote computer is locked and I lost access to it.

I'd really appreciate it if you could look into this, thank you!

[vinaykapadia]

AFAIK this has nothing to do with MouseJiggler code and there is nothing we can do within it to fix it. It's in the way Powershell is running the process. I've tried a few things, using Start-Process, but no matter what I do, when I close the Powershell window, MouseJiggler exits.

[vinaykapadia]

Also if you're running the process, the IT guys can see it. Hiding the directory isn't going to help that. Proceed at your own risk.

[sepsol]

Also if you're running the process, the IT guys can see it. Hiding the directory isn't going to help that. Proceed at your own risk.

Thanks for the heads up!

Well, I hope someone is able to come up with a workaround to get around PowerShell's limitations.

[vinaykapadia]

Ok, so it looks like it is partially the MouseJiggler code that affects this.

mousejiggler/MouseJiggler/Program.cs

Line 36 in 02b2ecd

PInvoke.AttachConsole(Helpers.AttachParentProcess);

This line attaches MouseJiggler to the console, that is why it closes when the console closes. I don't know if the repo owners want to change it though.

You can do this as a workaround. From within a powershell window, run this command:

powershell -NoProfile { & "MouseJiggler.exe" }

[sepsol]

@vinaykapadia I just tested and that works perfectly, thanks!

---

UPDATE:

For now, I created an alias for MouseJiggler like this:

> notepad $PROFILE

Inside the file I entered:

$env:Path += "C:\path\to\MouseJiggler_portable;"
function Start-MouseJiggler { powershell -NoProfile -Command { & MouseJiggler -j -s 60 -m -z } }
Set-Alias -Name mj -Value Start-MouseJiggler

Then I saved the file and sourced the $PROFILE:

> . $PROFILE

After all the above, I'm able to just run mj in a PowerShell terminal and not worry about exiting MouseJiggler upon closing the terminal window/session.