Question

Is there a way to detect when the mouse has stopped moving in jquery?

Answer 1

Yes, use setTimeout and clear it every time when the mouse moves. If the mouse hasn’t been moved in the time specified in setTimeout, then you can assume mouse has stopped moving. Utilizing jQuery, you could do something like this:

var stop_timeout = false;
$(function() {
    $().mousemove(function() {
        clearTimeout(stop_timeout);
        stop_timeout = setTimeout(function() {
            alert("The mouse has stopped.");
        }, 1000);            
    });
});

It’s a bit heavy to set and unset timeouts every time the mouse moves, but it should work for your purposes.