X/Mouse Extra Buttons HOWTO

meowsqueak · Posted: Mon Oct 20, 2003 4:17 am Post subject: X/Mouse Extra Buttons HOWTO

EDIT: This post formed the basis for the following Gentoo Wiki article: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Advanced_Mouse

Got one of those Microsoft Explorer/Intellimouse mice with the extra buttons? Ever wondered how to get those buttons working in X? Wonder no more...

(This has been tested with a Microsoft Intellimouse Optical and should work with the Explorer too. I would like people to try this out for themselves please and report back on what other mice work or don't work with this method).

A typical configuration for such mice often looks like this [XF86Config]:

tomchuk · Guru Joined: 23 Mar 2003 Posts: 317 Location: Brooklyn, NY

You also might have to add

ecatmur · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 5:15 am Post subject:

Good stuff. I've decided to map the side buttons to buttons 8 and 9 - I only have one scroll wheel but this way I can tell imwheel to detect them as 'Thumb1' and 'Thumb2'. (Plus it leaves buttons 6 and 7 open for when I do get a horizontal scrollwheel...)

So, I use

nico-- · n00b Joined: 29 Jul 2002 Posts: 59

Would this method also work for mice with even more buttons? Like those new ones that have 'web' buttons on them.
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ecatmur · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 5:30 am Post subject:

Maybe someone will correct me, but I can't see any way to use more than 9 buttons in total with imwheel and xmodmap. Might be time for someone to make a patch - I probably would if I had such a mouse.
By the way, how do they fit more than 9 logical buttons onto a mouse anyway? What does the Windows software do with the actions? Can you link to a product page?

meowsqueak · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 5:42 am Post subject:

No problem.

Do you know how to match the root window btw? I'd love to have my buttons work on the root window - but imwheel doesn't match it with ".*" - is there a special ID for it?

ecatmur · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 12:00 pm Post subject:

Sorry, I don't - xprop -root doesn't give a window name or class. The imwheel manpage mentions the Window Resource Name - I've forgotten what that is for the root window though. Alternatively you could match on "$null$" I guess, and hope it doesn't match any other windows.

meowsqueak · Posted: Wed Oct 22, 2003 7:20 pm Post subject:

Unfortunately, it seems neither "(null)" or "$null$" match the root window. When I used imwheel -D, it seems that the last window that had focus is checked when clicking on the root window - I wonder if that's because the root window is never actually selected in fluxbox.

ecatmur · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2003 1:47 am Post subject:

Eh, that sucks. (You could always I guess use a desktop program without anything on it...)

marienZ · Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2003 10:59 am Post subject:

Thanks, now I just have to figure out what to do with the extra button...

I'm using a logitech mx300, which has just one extra button, and your howto works just fine. I think it's a bit odd I have to use the ExplorerPS/2 driver for this mouse, but what the heck, it works

(apparently, logitech and microsoft are using the same protocol here, or the linux usb hid driver is, i'm not sure).

nico-- · n00b Joined: 29 Jul 2002 Posts: 59

greenbob · n00b Joined: 24 Jun 2003 Posts: 48 Location: Charlotte, NC

I have followed all the instructions I can find but am still unable to get my side buttons to work.
The wheel works fine in mozilla but the side buttons only scroll up in mozilla

I use startx to start gnome, and placed these lines in /etc/X11/Sessions/Gnome:

tomchuk · Guru Joined: 23 Mar 2003 Posts: 317 Location: Brooklyn, NY

The window title in quotes in the imwheelrc file is evaluated as a RegEx. So when you say "mozilla", what imwheel is doing is matching to window titles that are "mozilla" and "mozilla" only. If you want to match a window title that has mozilla in it, use "^<window name>$" as in ecatmur's example. So for mozilla it would be "^mozilla-bin$" as /usr/bin/mozilla is just a script to run /usr/lib/mozilla/mozilla-bin. Use ps to check for what is actually running. ie. xterm is not "Xterm", but "xterm". So to match all xterm windows you'd use "^xterm$"

Also, when specifying buttons with the -b option with imwheel, the should be in quotes, like "67" instead of just 67

Make those 2 changes and everything should be working for you.

greenbob · n00b Joined: 24 Jun 2003 Posts: 48 Location: Charlotte, NC

I followed the instructions exactly and now have the mouse working correctly, however, I was wondering, is there any way to speed up the scrolling speed of the mouse?

tomchuk · Guru Joined: 23 Mar 2003 Posts: 317 Location: Brooklyn, NY

I believe scrolling behavior is managed by the window manager. For instance in KDE (kwin) you can change the options in control center -> peripherals -> mouse -> advanced -> "mouse wheel scrolls by".

But there is nothing stopping you from using imwheel to map buttons 4 and 5 (your wheel) to PgUp and PgDn if you want a little more scroll.

RedBeard0531 · Guru Joined: 21 Sep 2002 Posts: 415 Location: maryland

Why arnt apps writen to natively take advantage of these buttons, as opposed to such (IMO) dirty hacks. I realize that UNIX traditionaly supported 3 buttons, but come on! They were able to allow for the wheel after all. These are not a passing tchnology "fad". I think that linux devs need to get with the times, instead of sticking to old standerds.
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meowsqueak · Posted: Mon Oct 27, 2003 7:42 pm Post subject:

Mouse handling in X has nothing to do with 'UNIX'.

X has the concept of 'events' (as does Windows) and a control heirarchy - peripherals such as your mouse and keyboard generate events that are passed down the heirarchy in different ways. First, the input stimulus received by the kernel (via a driver) and is passed to user-space and converted to an X event by an X input driver. Then this event is passed up to an application. This application may be a window manager, an app like something like Mozilla, or it may be something in a slightly different role, like imwheel.

When you consider that these extra buttons do NOT work in Windows by default (you need a special driver installed, which recently is there by default I think, but it wasn't always - I'm thinking of that scroll feature) then it's not so bad to have a separate program manage these events. It provides far more flexibility, as well as reducing the amount of work a particular developer has to go through to make his app work with every possible button event. Consider that button X on one mouse might make sense as a 'Browser Forward' instruction but on another it might generate the mousewheel-down event.

I agree it could be better - most of the really nifty and powerful things you can do in *nix are the result of similar 'ugly hacks'. You can't even begin to do the same sort of stuff in Windows without writing your own mouse hook handler - and that is ugly! But I know what you're saying - emulating keyboard presses isn't exactly elegant.

But if it works... then what's the problem?

ck42 · l33t Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 789

Still trying to figure out how to make my side (thumb) button do something like minimize a window (my fav. for the thumb button in windoze).

Is this even possible? Can you specify actions like this?

meowsqueak · Posted: Thu Oct 30, 2003 10:56 pm Post subject:

imwheel only sends keyboard 'events', but if you configure 'minimise window' to some key combo in your window manager, then yes, it's possible.

In time, you'll come to realise that anything is possible in Linux, however the required time and effort to implement certain things is unbounded... Unless you want to reverse engineer certain other operating systems, you can argue that certain things are impossible with those.

tommythecat · n00b Joined: 31 Oct 2003 Posts: 1 Location: Pittsburgh PA

Hey thanks for the guide. But I have a very newbish question

First:
Im a complete and total linux newb just trying to get my feet wet.
Second:
I am running redhat 9

I was pointed to this link by a friend because I am trying to get all of my mouse buttons to work.

I went through your instuctions and everything seems to be working fine up to getting the line: xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5" to run automatically at start up.

Everything works great if I run that line from a terminal each time I boot, but I can't seem to get it to run automatically, so I figured that before i mess things up fumbling around with things I know nothing about I should probably come here and ask the experts. Can anyone here give me specific (remember im a complete newb to linux) instructions on how to get that line to run automatically each time I satrt X-windows?

Any help will be greatly apreciated.

Thank you.

ecatmur · Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2003 12:33 am Post subject:

Sorry, but the correct way to get xmodmap to swap the buttons will likely differ between distros. You would be better off asking that question in a Red Hat support forum or a general Linux forum.

sarumont · Posted: Sat Nov 01, 2003 5:09 pm Post subject:

I have an Intellimouse Trackball Explorer (7 buttons). The wheel is working and the two extra buttons are working, but for some reason Mozilla Firebird doesn't go back and forward with my settings:

greenbob · n00b Joined: 24 Jun 2003 Posts: 48 Location: Charlotte, NC

Is there a way to get the scroll wheel to scroll withing boxes or frames on a webpage, (similar to in windows) rather than always scrolling the entire page?

genoob · n00b Joined: 02 Nov 2003 Posts: 8

To get the side buttons working in xfce4, you need to make a little script (and set it as executable) in your ~/Desktop/Autostart/ directory:

DeepThoughts · Posted: Sun Nov 09, 2003 4:40 pm Post subject:

Hi!

Im very new to Linux (1½ week) and I can't get this to work... I can do it manualy but I can't get it to work automaticly.

My problems are that I don't seem to have an .xinitrc file and I don't know how to execute 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"' trough .xinitrc or any other file...

Hope this makes sense...

I'm running kernel 2.4.20-r8 and Gnome 2.4

//Stefan