Fedora 17 released

Posted May 30, 2012 0:05 UTC (Wed) by daniels (subscriber, #16193)
In reply to: Fedora 17 released by cmm
Parent article: Fedora 17 released

You can just change VertScrollDelta in the Synaptics driver to a negative value instead of xmodmap; this will also work with smooth scrolling.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 30, 2012 4:07 UTC (Wed) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (9 responses)

Yeah, so there is a fix for synaptics touchpads.
But not for mice, trackballs or those funky rubber-topped thigies found in the middle of Thinkpad keyboards.
The .Xmodmap incantation, of course, worked for everything.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 10:06 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (8 responses)

So I suppose I am suppose to guess from all of this that GTK 3.4 ignores Xmodmap ?

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 10:25 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (7 responses)

No. GTK+ 3.4 listens to the new smooth scrolling events from Xi 2.1 (i.e. xorg-server 1.12.0+). The smooth scrolling events are not affected by the xmodmap button map, so using xmodmap to set up reverse (or 'natural') scrolling no longer works. That's it.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 11:46 UTC (Thu) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (3 responses)

Leaving an option to turn off "smooth scrolling" (which is, I gather, a critical feature, even though I don't need it) was, obviously, out of the question. As is typical for the Gnome crowd.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 11:51 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link] (2 responses)

You could always just not upgrade. Or contribute a patch to make it optional since, y'know, no-one else has ever mentioned that they'd like to turn it off in the entire 18 months between the first patches for this feature hitting xorg-devel and now.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 12:20 UTC (Thu) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't feel strongly about smooth scrolling one way or the other, actually, I just hate that it broke that xmodmap hack I've been happily using.

Anyway, let me break the pattern of just complaining. It is possible to have natural scrolling even with GTK+ 3.4, and not just for Synaptics touchpads. Like this:

1. Disable the button remapping hack (comment it out in your .Xmodmap or whatever) -- leaving it there would mean continued confusion.

2. Now, your pointing devices have to support the 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes' XInput property. For those that do (I don't have any mice around to check, but my Logitech trackball does, and so do TrackPoints):

xinput "${dev}" 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes' 7 6 5 4

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 12:29 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

Ideally though, there'd be a single, global, non-driver-dependent property, so you could just say 'xinput "$dev" "Scroll Direction" -1'.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 12:24 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (2 responses)

How do you setup the reverse scolling nowadays? I checked out xinput command line application, but I didn't see anything in there that was obvious.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 12:32 UTC (Thu) by cmm (guest, #81305) [Link] (1 responses)

For Synaptics touchpads, set the 'Synaptics Scrolling Distance' property to a pair of negative values (like -100 -100).

For devices that have the 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes'property , set that to '7 6 5 4'.

For regular mice with an actual scroll wheel, no idea.

Doing the equivalent of all this using just one line in .Xmodmap was definitely more convenient (not to mention more robust: any devices you would plug in at run time would scroll right without having to configure them specially), but I guess progress happens.

Fedora 17 released

Posted May 31, 2012 15:15 UTC (Thu) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]

If it's an xorg.conf option as well, then you can use an InputClass snippet in xorg.conf.d to automatically apply it to all devices, or only a certain subset of devices, or, or.