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Armin Ronacher

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Two Finger Scrolling on Ubuntu

written by Armin Ronacher, on Tuesday, November 13, 2007 7:05.

One of the things I love about Macbook is that it has this nifty two finger scrolling enabled by default. But thanks to the awesome synaptics linux driver you can get that on any ubuntu system too as long as your touchpad isn't too old. There are countless tutorials on that on the web, however there is one stupid pitfall.

If you enable two finger scrolling you will most likely hit a “feature” of Firefox. It will go forward and backward in history under some strange conditions. It may be useful if one can figure out how to trigger it, but the better way is to disable it like it's on OS X. Set the following settings in your about:config: 

mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action = 0
mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines = true

Just for completeness here my xorg.conf settings: 

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "MaxTapTime"            "120"
        Option          "MaxTapMove"            "150"
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "true"
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "true"
        Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "false"
        Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "false"
        Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option          "TapButton2"            "3"
        Option          "TapButton3"            "2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
EndSection

Tagged as: planetubuntu, snippets, ubuntu

Comments

  1. Does it work for non macbook laptop ?

    —  bsheep on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11:35 #

  2. Dank Dir, das kannte ich noch nicht. Sehr nützlich!

    —  Ste on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 15:00 #

  3. Yes it works with other notebooks too. I have three notebooks here (one as old as 5 years) and it works with all of them. However the driver documentation states that it requires hardware support so I guess that feature does not exist in every synaptics touchpad.

    —  Armin Ronacher on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 16:34 #

  4. Thanks for this. I don't use the two finger scrolling, but the effects in FF were driving me nuts. I just disabled them.

    —  quinnten83 on Friday, November 16, 2007 10:43 #

  5. [...] Lucumr Cogitations » Blog Archive » Two Finger Scrolling on Ubuntu [...]

    —  pinged bonq.net/flipp » Blog Archive » daily del.icio.us on Sunday, December 30, 2007 2:20 #

  6. Thanks mate!

    A very cool feature that seems to work very good, even on non-mac computers.

    —  Marcus on Sunday, March 2, 2008 15:45 #

  7. yay! thanks so much - this has been really annoying!

    —  benji on Wednesday, April 9, 2008 16:13 #

  8. Thanks for this! Two-finger scrolling is awesome. Though mine seems a bit jumpy.

    —  Owen on Monday, April 28, 2008 3:22 #

  9. I found the conf lines in this doc to be more like OSX:

    https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro#head-e5f9428cfdf3878b36ba5265184e8e2e2a9b3295

    —  noaht on Saturday, May 17, 2008 21:27 #

  10. Thanks for the info! I have an iBook and every time I used my Ubuntu laptop I tried using the 2 button scroll and right click. Now it works like a charm!

    —  Robbie on Friday, May 23, 2008 19:32 #

  11. I would like to make the change but you did not give directory where this file is found. Some assistance please.

    —  Paul G on Saturday, November 22, 2008 11:51 #

  12. hey all! great work on this! does anyone know if it's possible to do this in windows on a dell latitude cpxj750gt (more commonly known as the latitude cpx, the 750gt just denotes what processor it has0? thanks in advance! -Parker B.

    —  Parker B on Sunday, February 22, 2009 1:59 #

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