middleclickscroll
A tiny C program to enable middle click scrolling in X.
I use a Wacom tablet to control my linux machine and I was fed up with the fact that there was no decent way to scroll. I tried a few tools but none seemed to do what I wanted. During the search for new tools I stumbled upon xmouseless, a tool to control your mouse using your keyboard. It wasn't what I was after, but I got inspired and decided to borrow bits of their code to build something new. I am not a great C programmer, but I do have experience in programming various other languages. If you are a C programmer and you see something weird, let me know and I will fix it. :)
The only downside to this is that this programs emulates mouse-scroll events. As far as I know that is the only way to scroll in X, but you cannot scroll slow and smooth. Scrolling slow just means having fewer scroll events per second.
Features
- It polls your mouse button state and starts scrolling when your press the middle mouse (or any other mouse button/modifier).
- The scroll speed is defined by the distance from the point where you started pressing the button. Like autoscroll in firefox.
- The button, modifier key, scroll speed and scroll direction can be configured in config.h
- It auto clears your middle-mouse-paste buffer so you are not pasting selections all over the place.
Installation
make
sudo make install
You will need to install some headers to build this. On debian based disros:
sudo apt-get install libx11-dev libxtst-dev
After installing (or just building) you can add it to your Gnome/KDE/X startup scripts.
Configuration
The configuration is done in config.h, which is a C header file, but you don't need any programming knowledge to edit it. After you edited the file, you have to run make again.