I have a fresh Tumbleweed (20231228) with GNOME on my HP Elitebook 845 G7.
This laptop only has two buttons above the touchpad. When using the pointing stick (aka trackpoint), scrolling is not possible due to the missing middle button. That is why I would like to emulate the middle button by clicking both left and right click.
In the dconf editor I found some entries for middle-click-emulation in some devices under org.gnome.desktop.peripherals and I enabled them all (mouse, trackball and touchpad). But the pointingstick has no such entry. That one does have a scroll-method and I tried all three values (default, none and on-button-down) but none worked.
On my Dell Latitude laptop, I have a pad and two buttons just below the pad.
If I want to scroll, I used two fingers and slide them down or up along the pad, depending on the direction i want to scroll the page. (one finger to move the mouse)
If I want to do a middle-click, I simply tap the left and right buttons simultaneously.
I did not install any special drivers … it worked “right out the the box”, after installing TW (a very long time ago )
I know how to scroll via the touchpad but it is not convenient when using the pointing stick (aka trackpoint) to move the fingers down and away from the home-row.
Which is why I would like to know how I can configure the system to scroll when holding both buttons down at the same time and using the pointing stick to scroll.
Similar to a thinkpad where when holding down the middle button and moving the pointing stick allows one to scroll. From googling, this configuration was possible in X11 times with xinput like here in the Arch wiki it is described (by holding down just the right button): TrackPoint - ArchWiki
//Edit: Also @aggie you are describing a different setup where click-buttons are below the touchpad. On my device, on thinkpads and some Dell laptops, the click-buttons are above the touchpad so they can be used together with the pointing stick.
Yea, we have a Thinkpad too … which has the touchpad and two buttons above, and the red “eraser” stick. Unfortunately, I can’t relate how it should be configured for your needs … ours sits 99% of its time in a Docking Station, connected to an external monitor , and an external (desktop) keyboard and mouse
The incredibly rare times I’ve used it without the Docking, I’ve never used the stick - for me, kind of a pain (it’s not sensitive enough).
Anyway, someone will be along to provide an answer
You can turn on the middle click emulation using xinput.
Open a terminal and type: xinput list-props 'PS/2 Generic Mouse' | grep -i middle
You should see something like this: libinput Middle Emulation Enabled (335): 0
Take that number (in my example 335) and type: xinput set-prop 'PS/2 Generic Mouse' 335 1
This should turn on the third button emulation.
It’s not an optimal solution for me because it’s difficult to simultaneously press both buttons using one finger. I prefer to use the right mouse button for scrolling.
I did it by setting the Button Scrolling Button option to 3
I tried something like this before but xinput does not work on Wayland.
On Wayland, there is libinput which allows to query the devices (but not setting properties afaics)…
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