PointerEvent: pointerType property

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.

The pointerType read-only property of the PointerEvent interface indicates the device type (mouse, pen, or touch) that caused a given pointer event.

Value

The event's pointer type. The supported values are the following strings:

"mouse"

The event was generated by a mouse device.

"pen"

The event was generated by a pen or stylus device.

"touch"

The event was generated by a touch, such as a finger.

If the device type cannot be detected by the browser, the value can be an empty string (""). If the browser supports pointer device types other than those listed above, the value should be vendor-prefixed to avoid conflicting names for different types of devices.

Examples

This example illustrates using the value of the pointerType property to call the appropriate pointer type processing function.

js
targetElement.addEventListener("pointerdown", (event) => {
  // Call the appropriate pointer type handler
  switch (event.pointerType) {
    case "mouse":
      process_pointer_mouse(event);
      break;
    case "pen":
      process_pointer_pen(event);
      break;
    case "touch":
      process_pointer_touch(event);
      break;
    default:
      console.log(`pointerType ${event.pointerType} is not supported`);
  }
});