To take full advantage of your new and semi-ugly mouse, you'll need a kernel that supports
evdev
. Check whether you have it:
modprobe evdev
If you get
FATAL: Module evdev not found., it doesn't exist as a module, but maybe, it's compiled into the kernel proper. If your kernel remembers the configuration it was built with, try
zcat /proc/config.gz|grep EVDEV. If it doesn't, but you have the kernel sources you built from, then I really don't have to tell you this, but something like
grep EVDEV /usr/src/linux/.config should do the trick. If your kernel does not support
evdev
, you cannot proceed. Get a kernel that does, or give up.
You'll also need an
Xserver that supports
evdev
. Reasonably new versions of
X.org
do, but the
evdev
-driver may be in a separate package that you'll need to have installed (
x11-input-evdev on SuSE).
Now that that's out of the way, let's assume your mouse is connected via USB.
# cat /proc/cat /proc/bus/input/devices
...
I: Bus=0003 Vendor=045e Product=008c Version=0056
N: Name="Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse® 1.0A" (name)
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:10.0-2/input0 (phys device)
H: Handlers=mouse0 event2 evbug (/dev/input/event2)
B: EV=7
B: KEY=1f0000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=1c3
We'll use these data for
/etc/X11/XF86Config:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Driver "evdev"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7 5 4"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
Option "Dev Name" "Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Mouse 1.0A"
Option "Dev Phys" "usb-0000:00:10.0-2/input0"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection
This should give you a mouse with three buttons, and a scroll- and tilt-wheel once you restart X. The thumb-buttons (8,9) are still ignored in all apps though. I had special plans for them, so I seized them using
imwheel
:
imwheel -k -b "89". (This can go into whichever of
~/.xsession and
~/.xinitrc you have so you don't have to type it everytime you log in.) I want the buttons to react to the application I'm using them in, though — time for some
~/.imwheelrc magic:
"screen"
Control_L, Button5, Control_L|a|n
Control_L, Button4, Control_L|a|p
".*"
None, Button5, Button2
None, Button4, Button2
Control_L, Button5, Alt_L|Left
Control_L, Button4, Alt_L|Right
Shift_L, Button5, Button1|Home
Shift_L, Button4, Button1|End
The left bit is what keys (shift, alternate, control, ...) have to be pressed in combination with the mouse-button(s) in the middle for us to emit the buttons and/or keys on the right, so the first line means, if
Button5
is pressed while the left
control
key is held, emit
control
,
a and
n. (The
screen
program will switch to the next terminal upon seeing
^A^N.)
So our thumb-buttons (8,9) are (4,5) inside
imwheel
. Yeah, WTF.
The first section is for the
screen
program (which multiplexes terminals, giving your "several shell in one window"): when in
screen
and the left
Control
key is pressed, make the thumb-buttons switch to the previous/next shell, respectively.
The last section matches anything else, it's the fallback: with no modifiers (
shift, control, alt, ...
), the thumb-buttons (4,5) should act like button 2 (the middle button / scroll-wheel) and paste the selection. I always found it awkward to "click" using the mouse-wheel, and on my logitech, the thumb-button was a button "2" (same as clicking the middle-button/wheel), so I'll stick with what I'm used to.
If used with the left
control
key,
Alt
plus the left resp. right cursor-key should be emitted: this will make
control
+ thumb-button go forward/backward in most web-browser's page-history.
Finally, if used with shift, we want to go the the top/bottom of the page. To do this, we emit
button1
to focus the area under the mouse (just in case) as well as
Home
or
End
, respectively.
If you also wish to use the tilt-wheel from within
imwheel
, call it like so:
imwheel -k -b 8967 To use tilting the wheel as an alternative way of changing terminals in
screen
, add lines for the
left
and
right
events:
"screen"
Control_L, Button5, Control_L|a|n
Control_L, Button4, Control_L|a|p
None, Left, Control_L|a|n
None, Right, Control_L|a|p
Since 8,9 in
X
are 4,5 inside of
imwheel
, they're 6,7 inside of
xemacs
. Sure, we could make a special case for
xemacs
in
~/.imwheelrc, but just for practice, here goes (
~/.xemacs/init.el snippet):
;; mouse-wheel: scroll
(global-set-key 'button4 'scroll-down-command)
(global-set-key 'button5 'scroll-up-command)
;; tilt-wheel: go to previous/next buffer
;; ERC (emacs Internet Relay Chat) users may prefer binding
;; erc-track-switch-buffer
(global-set-key 'button6 'switch-to-previous-buffer)
(global-set-key 'button7 'switch-to-next-buffer)
Finally, to modify what the tilt-wheel does in
Mozilla/Firefox
, open
about:config and change the
mousewheel.horizscroll group of settings.
Unfortunately,
previous tab/next tab
is not an option in those settings, so to do that, we'll have to once more modify
~/.imwheelrc:
"[Gg]aleon(-bin)?"
None, Left, Control_L|Page_Up
None, Right, Control_L|Page_Down
Voilà tout, enjoy your mouse like a true kitty!
Recently aquired toy: Wireless IntellMouse Explorer If you google for it in connection with Linux, you quickly discover this very helpful link Unfortunately, this doesn’t work with Breezy, which does include an evdev driver, but only as a prot...
Tracked: Nov 08, 11:37
It's the Chinese Year of the Mouse. First my beloved logitech mouse died. All I could get on short notice at the time was an IntelliMouse Explorer 2.0 (see there for installation) though I'd have preferred another logi, the size and shape of which suit me
Tracked: Jul 15, 14:02