Proper scrolling with the Thinkpad Trackpoint
Until now I have been using the standard method of getting scroll wheel functionality by holding down button 3 and then scroll. This is quite great, but it destroys middleclick-to-paste, which is one of Linux’s better features.
After a 2 months vacation in Windows-land I arrived at Destination Dapper (Ubuntu 6.06) yesterday, and started looking for the recipe for TrackPoint scroll in X.org again. I ended up with something much much better.
After googling around a bit I finally located tp-scroll. This piece of software gave me nice vertical scrolling AND middleclick-to-paste at the same time. I was so happy. However, someone had mailed in a patch that enabled horizontal scrolling as well. It was a little messy to get this to work, but this is how I did it on my IBM Thinkpad T40p with X11R7:
- Follow the install instructions on the web site and restart X
- Set up buttons with xmodmap:
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7"
Add this to your startup scripts.
- Fix Mozilla/Firefox. They normally bind horizontal scroll to the Back/Forward functionality. Go to
about:configand alter the following preferences:mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action integer 0 mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines integer 1
