Virtual Touchpad

This application allows you to use a mobile phone or tablet as a touchpad and keyboard for your computer.

No software needs to be installed on the device.

Quick Start

On Windows, you can use the pre-packaged binary virtualtouchpad.exe. When you run it, an icon will appear in the notification area. Hovering over this icon reveals the URL to use on your phone or tablet.

If no pre-built executable exists for your platform, launch it from a terminal:

python -m virtualtouchpad

This will start an HTTP server. It will print the line:

Starting server http://<computer name>:<port>/...

Connect to the URL displayed.

Installation

Install this application by running the following command:

pip install virtual-touchpad

Installation issues

When installing, the dependencies for this application are also downloaded. Some of the dependencies are native libraries and must be compiled before they can be used.

There is no standard way of providing any dependencies for the native libraries through this website, so they must thus be present on your computer before you run the installation, as do Python development headers files.

The easies way to install the headers is via the packager manager provided by your operating system. The names of the packages required depend on your specific operating system.

Building

If you want to have access to pre-release versions, you can clone the git repository available from the linked home page below. Install by running this command:

cd $VIRTUAL_TOUCHPAD_REPO
python bootstrap.py
# Follow instructions to activate virtualenv
python setup.py install

Building a native binary

If you intend to run the build target build_exe, you must activate the virtualenv.

This is to ensure that no optional dependencies for any libraries, PIL in particular, are included from the host system. PIL contains import statements for Tk and Qt, which will increase the size of the resulting binary, and thus the download and startup times, considerably.