Lefthanded mouse for specific device only - xinput or alternative tool on Leap

Dear all

I have used openSUSE Tumbleweed for years and decided to switch to Leap 15.5 - mainly for SLE compatibility with some proprietary software (i.a. AMD Proprietary GPU Graphic Drivers).

Nevertheless, I ran into a problem setting up my input devices. I use two mice, one right handed and one left handed - and I have issues setting that up:

  • KDE System Settings only allow me to change the left-handed mode for all mice simultaneously
  • xinput - which I used previously on Tumbleweed for this task - is not available as package on Leap 15.5
  • evdev ; resp. libinput - seems to be “only” available as community package for leap
  • input-remapper is another tool I found, but it also has has no package for openSUSE

Why are these tools in official repos for Tumbleweed, but not available in Leap?
Is there a technical reason for this?

I would prefer to have an official supported tool for this - being a command line tool, KDE application or whatever.

Am I missing another way for swapping two mouse buttons?
If not, would my best option be to install xinput manually?
Alternatively, could xinput (or another tool) be used from inside a distrobox?

Thank you for your help in advance.
Cheers Simon

@simon-77 Hi, xinput and libevdev2[-tools,devel] are available in Leap 15.5 from the Main Repository?

For input-remapper, it’s not in Tumbleweed or a Development Project, so would not be in Leap…

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Hey, thank you for your fast reply.

xinput is indeed available - I have not checked in my OS bevore, but only online: openSUSE Software

Why is it not listed there? :thinking:

software.opensuse.org is broken since ages…
If you search for software, use “zypper search” or yast software. After that you can also search at https://build.opensuse.org/ but this requires some experience how to use it properly…

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That’s definitely good to know.

Although I also like the YaST interface, I have often used the website software.opensuse.org because it was faster to open this web page than entering my root password :sweat_smile:

… speaking of YaST - I was wondering the other day while trying openSUSE MicroOS:

With the shift to ALP, will the whole YaST software suite be just dropped, without a direct replacement?

Only zypper has its “successor” with transactional-update pkg, but snapper & the YaST GUI - will they be gone?
It’s really enjoyable for me having these tools and I also use them on a regular basis.

To finish off the mouse button remapping issue - in case someone want’s to do the same:

I have used evdev configured through xorg - as explained in this post: manjaro - Swap mouse buttons? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange
evdev is actually already installed, I only needed xinput to list my input devices for modifying the MatchProduct parameter in the config.

@simon-77 I use cockpit here, but as a user, flatpacks, distrobox and podman…

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