[Fire TV General] shaunoleary:
Hi everyone,

If you've tried to get Mouse Toggle working, but find it's stuck on "Starting", I have found a workaround that might help. I don't know for sure if this will work on all Fire TV devices; YMMV. I have a Fire TV 4K Max, and a Fire TV Lite, both running FireOS 7.6.7.1.

Mouse Toggle relies on on having the binary file 'nmouseg' present in /data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle. I have found two thiings can happen when installing Mouse Toggle: (1) This directory is not created, and nmouseg is therefore not present, and (2) Even if the directory and nmouseg file are present, Mouse Toggle still won't work.

If you can gain access to your Fire TV via ADB, I have found a fairly simple (but not very elegant) workaround. Root on the Fire TV is not required. At the time of writing, this works on my unrooted Fire TV 4K Max running FireOS 7.6.7.1 (how I wish I could downgrade the OS!). You will need a PC or other device with ADB, and be able to ADB connect to your Fire TV. This process is for a Linux PC, you may need to adapt it a bit if you're using a Windows PC.

Dowload Mouse Toggle APK (attached - this APK is not modified in any way from the original).

Unzip the APK. In the root folder there is a file called 'nmouseg'; copy this somewhere on your hard drive. You'll need it shortly.

Connect your PC to your FireTV: adb connect ip.address.of.firetv:port - eg: adb connect 192.168.1.5:5555

install the Mouse Toggle APK to your FireTV: adb install 'Mouse Toggle-v1.11.apk'

Make sure you're in the directory on your PC you copied the 'nmouseg' file to.

Now we need to copy the 'nmouseg' file to a specific location on your FireTV and make it executable: Execute these commands:

adb shell mkdir -p /data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle

adb push nmouseg /data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle

adb shell chmod 755 /data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle/nmouseg

adb disconnect

Reboot your Fire TV, and open the Mouse Toggle app. Try starting the service, if it says "Service: started" - wonderful, double click the PLAY/PAUSE button, and see if the mouse pointer appears. If it does, that's great, you don't need to do anything else.

If Mouse Toggle gets stuck on "Starting", and no mouse pointer appears, then there is one more step you'll need to do. Connect to your Fire TV with adb again, and enter this command:

adb shell /data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle/nmouseg start &

Try double-clicking PLAY/PAUSE again; you should now see the mouse pointer, and should be able to move it around with the D-pad on your remote. You should now be able to run adb disconnect to disconnect your PC from the Fire TV.

Unfortunately, this method doesn't seem to survive a reboot of the Fire TV, however I've found the Mouse Toggle remains active indefinitely so long as the Fire TV is not rebooted or loses power. If you need to reboot the Fire TV, or if it stops working, you only need to repeat Step 8.

What I've done is created a simple shell script (Linux), which I have set to run whenever I boot my PC (if you're using a Windows PC, you may need to tweak the script so it works on Windows):

#!/bin/bash
adb connect ip.addr.of.firetv:5555
sleep 5
adb shell "/data/local/tmp/.mousetoggle/nmouseg start &" &
sleep 5
adb disconnect

(enter the IP address of your Fire TV in the second line)

So, every time I start up my PC, it automatically activates Mouse Toggle on my Fire TV. The sleep commands may or may not be necessary; I just run them to give a 5-second buffer between commands being sent to the Fire TV.

Hope this helps someone!