Assigning functions to Turbo Mouse buttons/multi mice buttons (imwheel & X11)

[Eric Dunbar]

Hi all, I posted this to the Ubuntu forums re getting all of my Turbo
Mouse's buttons working (only half succeeded). I don't know if there's
an elegant solution to this problem on YDL but I thought I'd post my
solution here as well, in case someone else has a Turbo Mouse.

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 09:18:24 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Keywords: X11, X.org, configure mouse buttons, assign mouse buttons,
> assign actions to mouse buttons, Kensington Turbo Mouse, multi button
> mouse mice, five button mouse mice, imwheel, Intellimouse Intelli
> Mouse.
>
> > On Tue, Dec 28, 2004 at 10:25:33PM -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> >
> > > So, my questions is, how do I get GNOME to assign functions to
> > > particular mouse buttons? I have  no use for standard Linux 3rd & 4th
> > > button functionality so I'd prefer to reassign them (to something like
> > > ctrl pageup/down).

<http://www.google.com/search?q=configure+x11+mouse+buttons&btnG=Search&hl=en&lr=>

<https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/IntellimouseMousemanBackForwardButtons>
<http://subwiki.honeypot.net/cgi-bin/view/Computing/ExtraMouseButtons>

I used these wikis to get part of my Kensington Turbo Mouse Pro working.

I have the two bottom buttons as per usual (left & right clicks), the
scroll-wheel click is the middle click and the two top buttons are now
set up to ctrl-page up and ctrl-page-down in FireFox. The top row of
six buttons still cannot be controlled (at least, I haven't figured
out how to do so).

NOTE: You do not necessarily have to install imwheel to get the two
top buttons to be useful! If you modify the xorg.conf (aka
XF86Config-4) file to what I have here you STILL can use those buttons
in FireFox -- they default to Back/Forward in the browser history!

Comments:
The key is to install imwheel. It's available through Synaptic (GUI
front-end for apt-get). Do that first.

Then, you'll have to modify your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to register
that your mouse is more than the "standard" "5" buttons (aka
XF86Config-4 if you're still running the "old" x11 system).

FYI A standard 2 (left, right) + 1 (middle click/scroll wheel click) +
scroll wheel mouse is actually a five button mouse from X11's
perspective! The scroll wheel counts as mouse buttons 4 and 5.

Then, you'll have to modify your /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc or
~/.imwheelrc files to tell imwheel what to do with a mouse click in
each app (see the above Wikis for examples of how to structure your
imwheelrc or .imwheelrc file).

FYI If you go the ~/.imwheelrc route it means that you can customise
the imwheel behaviour for each user on the system.

Then, (if desired) you have to tell X11 to run imwheel whenever X11 is
started (modifying /etc/X11/Xsession.d/60imwheel_start-imwheel _and_
changing IMWHEEL_START=0 to =1 in /etc/X11/imwheel/startup.conf).

This is what the relevant portion of my xorg.conf file looks like:
Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
       Driver          "mouse"
       Option          "CorePointer"
       Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
       Option          "Protocol"              "ExplorerPS/2"
       Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "false"
       Option          "Buttons"               "7"
       Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "6 7"
EndSection

And my .imwheelrc looks like:
"^Firefox-bin$"
# Flip between browser tabs
None, Left, Control_L|Page_Up
None, Right, Control_L|Page_Down

Eric