Question

I have a JFrame that has a large number of changing child components. (Many layers) Is there any way to add a listener for all mouse events? Something like KeyEventDispatcher?

Answer 1

Use an AWTEventListener to filter out the MouseEvents:

long eventMask = AWTEvent.MOUSE_MOTION_EVENT_MASK + AWTEvent.MOUSE_EVENT_MASK;
Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().addAWTEventListener( new AWTEventListener()
{
    public void eventDispatched(AWTEvent e)
    {
        System.out.println(e);
    }
}, eventMask);

Check out Global Event Listeners for more information.