Arch Linux

Master One

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 249

Is the use of IMWHEEL really deprecated?

There seem to be quite some different advices around concerning how to use the additional thumb buttons like on a Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer.

Especially with xorg 7.1 it is often mentioned, that imweel is not needed any more, and it should be just enough to have something like this in xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
      Identifier  "Mouse1"
      Driver      "mouse"
      Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
      Option      "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
      Option      "Buttons" " 7"
      Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
      Option      "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
EndSection

But this does not work for me in KDE. Depending on the options in the above InputDevice section, the side-buttons of my mouse are either recognised as Button 6 & 7 or 8 & 9 by xev, but this is just not enough, because these buttons have to be mapped to the key functions XF86Forward and XF86Back somehow, which is not done by xorg, but by an additional program like imwheel.

So what's the way to go, and if there is still no way around imwheel, how to use it in Arch globally (so without having to start an imwheel process on a per user basis via .kde/Autostart)?

xabbott

Member

From: orlando, fl

Registered: 2007-01-11

Posts: 56

Website

Re: Is the use of IMWHEEL really deprecated?

you don't need imwheel.

Master One

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 249

Re: Is the use of IMWHEEL really deprecated?

you don't need imwheel.

But how is it supposed to work then?

As mentioned, if I just put the above InputDevice section in my xorg.conf, xev reports the thumb buttons of my mouse as Buttons 6 & 7 , but that's it, nothing happens if I press these buttons in Konqueror.

I've read somewhere, that this setup in xorg.conf should be enough for Firefox to act accordingly, but I don't have Firefox installed, and I also don't want to limit the use of these buttons to one single program.

So what exactly should map my mouse-thumb-buttons to XF86Forward & XF86Back, if not an additional program like imwheel???

It is really still a mystery to me, how to get the mouse extra buttons to work properly in KDE, and various tutorials and wiki-articles didn't help so far.

brazzmonkey

Member

From: between keyboard and chair

Registered: 2006-03-16

Posts: 818

Re: Is the use of IMWHEEL really deprecated?

imwheel should not be needed anymore, however xmodmap is required to set specific button actions per application.

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what goes up must come down

Master One

Member

From: Europe

Registered: 2007-01-21

Posts: 249

Re: Is the use of IMWHEEL really deprecated?

This is still not specific enough (and I can't be that stupid ). I just checked the xmodmap manpage, there seems to be no possibility to map a mouse-button to an action, like I did with my extra navigation keys of my ThinkPad keyboard, by putting the following into ~/.Xmodmap:

keycode 233 = XF86Forward
keycode 234 = XF86Back

If you meant mouse-button-mapping concerning the order of the buttons, so separate xmodmap -e "pointer = ..." is needed any more, because that can be taken care of in xorg.cnf as seen above.