Javascript how to detect the right click

DanielJuly 31, 2023August 4, 2023

The most reliable way I found to detect the mouse right click in Javascript is by using the contextmenu event:

element.addEventListener('contextmenu', (event) => {
    console.log("🖱 right click detected!")
})

So, if we want to disable the right-click on an element we can do as follows:

noRightClickEl.addEventListener('contextmenu', (event) => {
  alert("✋ no right click here")
  event.preventDefault()
})

If you want to test it out I’ve made this small code example.

By the way, I’ve seen that there is also another popular approach with using the event.button from the click event.

However, I’ve found that this solution does not work well for all cases. For example, it did not worked with my Magic Mouse or my Mackbook Pro trackpad.

// ❗️❗️❗️ this does not seems to work for 
//  Magic Mouse or Mackbook trackpad
element.addEventListener('click', (event) => {
  if(event.button == 2) {
    console.log("🖱 right click detected!")
  }
})

Wrote also this article about how to detect if the right click is being held in Javascript.