Two Finger Scrolling on Ubuntu

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"
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10 Responses to “Two Finger Scrolling on Ubuntu”

  1. Does it work for non macbook laptop ?

    Comment by bsheep — Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 @ 1:35 pm
  2. Dank Dir, das kannte ich noch nicht. Sehr nützlich!

    Comment by Ste — Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 @ 5:00 pm
  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.

    Comment by Armin Ronacher — Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 @ 6:34 pm
  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.

    Comment by quinnten83 — Friday, November 16th, 2007 @ 10:43 am
  5. […] Lucumr Cogitations » Blog Archive » Two Finger Scrolling on Ubuntu […]

    Comment by bonq.net/flipp » Blog Archive » daily del.icio.us — Sunday, December 30th, 2007 @ 2:20 am
  6. Thanks mate!

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

    Comment by Marcus — Sunday, March 2nd, 2008 @ 3:45 pm
  7. yay! thanks so much - this has been really annoying!

    Comment by benji — Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
  8. Thanks for this! Two-finger scrolling is awesome. Though mine seems a bit jumpy.

    Comment by Owen — Monday, April 28th, 2008 @ 3:22 am
  9. I found the conf lines in this doc to be more like OSX:

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

    Comment by noaht — Saturday, May 17th, 2008 @ 9:27 pm
  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!

    Comment by Robbie — Friday, May 23rd, 2008 @ 7:32 pm

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