Question

Is right click a Javascript event? If so, how do I use it?

Answer 1

As others have mentioned, the right mouse button can be detected through the usual mouse events (mousedown, mouseup, click). However, if you’re looking for a firing event when the right-click menu is brought up, you’re looking in the wrong place. The right-click/context menu is also accessible via the keyboard (shift+F10 or context menu key on Windows and some Linux). In this situation, the event that you’re looking for is oncontextmenu:

window.oncontextmenu = function ()
{
    showCustomMenu();
    return false;     // cancel default menu
}

As for the mouse events themselves, browsers set a property to the event object that is accessible from the event handling function:

document.body.onclick = function (e) {
    var isRightMB;
    e = e || window.event;

    if ("which" in e)  // Gecko (Firefox), WebKit (Safari/Chrome) & Opera
        isRightMB = e.which == 3; 
    else if ("button" in e)  // IE, Opera 
        isRightMB = e.button == 2; 

    alert("Right mouse button " + (isRightMB ? "" : " was not") + "clicked!");
} 

window.oncontextmenu – MDC