5mo ago

Windows-like middle-mouse button behaviour?

On Windows, if you click MMB on some windows, your mouse cursor will turn into a little ↕️ icon, and then you can scroll by moving the mouse cursor up and down, with it going faster the further you drag away from the position it was originally at.

This is one (1) behaviour I miss from Windows. Hours upon hours of scroll-wheeling makes my joints quite tired.

But well. Linux is nothing if not customisable, so I'm wondering if there's a way to recreate this behaviour on it.

I'm on KDE Plasma.

37 comments

In Firefox (and many forks of it) this is a setting in the app preferences, I think it is called "~~smooth scrolling~~ autoscrolling" or similar.
In most other apps I do not think this is possible.
edited, thanks for correction below
- Didn't realize this was a Firefox setting! "Use autoscrolling" was what worked for me
  
  yup, now that I think of it again, I think smooth scrolling is something different, autoscrolling is what I meant
- Having that on Firefox is already quite the game changer. I just had no idea it was there. Thanks.
- Wow thanks. Was missing that for a long time.

In mouse settings there should be option "Press middle button and move mouse to scroll"
- Not quite what I was hoping for... But it does help.
  
  Not trying to be a dick, but how is it different? From your description of what you were missing it sounds like exactly the same thing.

TIL people use this feature and it's for joint pain, cool.
- Call it a reverse curb-cut effect, I first discovered it when I was a teenager, and back then I'd sometimes use it out of laziness or because it was quicker (ah how I miss being young and immune to pain)
  Then when time happened and I started having arthritis flareups, it was there to help me, and I was like "heck, that's a neat thing for accessibility"
  
  i've come to this in the opposite direction as you. when i switched to linux full time; that middle mouse button wasn't so ubiquitously set as you've described it (none of the windows systems i've owned had it); but the middle mouse button on linux has been ubiquitously set as a 2nd clipboard since the 1970's.
  i've grown so accustomed that the middle mouse button gives me a second copy/paste that i had trouble with it when i bought my first linux laptop and the built-in kde decided to mimic that window's scroll just like you described it and i had to learn how to turn it off. lol
- I like to use it when I'm reading, I'll set it to move at my reading pace and then I don't have to touch anything to read the article.

...but then you're losing quick copy and paste.
Select text then middle click on the window you want to paste it. No keys. Select and a single click.
Of course, if you have more than three mouse buttons you can do both.
- Eh?
  I don't paste things as often as I scroll. Plus, my brain associates copying and pasting with the keyboard commands, from 20+ years of doing -- That.
  Edit-to-answer-your-edit: My mouse has 7 buttons, I'm golden.
  
  Interesting. I somehow rewired my brain when I switched to Linux and now I'm constantly annoyed when middle click doesn't paste.
- I don't use the quick copy and paste on my Thinkpad because it's so easy to accidentally trigger. I use it more often on my desktop, though.

MMB is for quick-copy-paste and close-tab !!!

OP, there are two parts to this.
One is handles by your Desktop Environment for desktop scrolling outside of apps. Others have mentioned this.
The other is handled directly by browsers.
To enable this for browsers:
Firefox: under about:config, the key general.autoScroll needs to be set to true
Chrome:
Chrome (and any electron based apps) needs to have the following additional flag added to launch with support for middle click scroll: --enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll
I would also advise you to map 2 of your mouse buttons to scroll up and scroll down, that way you can just hold a key down to scroll instead of shaking your mouse around using the autoscroll arrows.
- The Firefox one is enabled already. I don't do Chrome(ium) unless I absolutely have no choice.
  .... But yeah I'd like to enable it for other applications. Dunno if it is possible though.

In GTK/GNOME apps this is remedied by scrolling your mouse wheel over the scrolling indicator (the small side bar that shows up while scrolling). It makes the scrolling much faster this way, but I agree it's not ideal and the windows behaviour is better UX wise

I have a couple of Logitech Mx Master 3S mice I use. One really nice feature is that you can 'unlock' the mouse scroll wheel so that there's no resistance. Just spin it fast and it'll keep scrolling for quite a long time.
Actually this most recent version will do click scrolling when the wheel is spun at low speeds, but unlock and let the wheel fly when spun faster. Really great feature.
I know it's also not what you were asking about, but I don't know of that feature in Linux.
- I actually have one of those Logi mice with unlockable scrollwheels
  ...... I only lock it for playing FPSes, to use the wheel to switch weapons. Otherwise it stays unlocked for minimal resistance.

Thanks for posting this. Been using Linux exclusively for almost 10 years now but I still miss scrolling by clicking the MMB. I have some problems with my fingers so using the scroll wheel is rather unpleasant, yet necessarily, especially when scrolling down slowly and steadily for a long time (e g. while reading/scanning stuff)

I wish KDE was a little more customizable on that front, I can either have it be left corner for left click, middle bottom for middle click and right bottom for right click, OR click anywhere and it's a left click and do multi finger pressed for mid/right click.
I just want left and right click, I have a superwide TouchPad on this laptop and the amount of times I close shit (why is middle mouse close for so many things?) is quite irritating.

I thought that's a firefox exclusive feature. in which other programs did you see it work?
- MS word, Telegram, Notepad++.
  
  for me it doesn't work in telegram and notepad++, but does in word. this seems to be a program-specific feature though, not an os-specific one

And I always thought my Linux VMs were just not working correctly when I tried to use that feature. I'm surprised that Linux doesn't have it. I use it constantly on Windows.

Interesting, I've never seen this behaviour on Windows.

I've got the same complaint here. Firefox has a setting, but it's kinda crap and is only in Firefox. I haven't been able to find a solution that works system wide and isn't horrible jank. I'm on mint with cinnamon, btw.

37 comments