Windows – How is it possible to emulate mouse wheel scrolling using the touch screen on Windows 8.1? I.e. remapping touch gestures to mouse events

autohotkeymousescrollingtouchscreenwindows 8

I recently bought the Surface Pro 3 and
noticed a very annoying problem concerning
all applications that do not yet support touch
input.

For example:
The note taking application "Evernote" does
not support scrolling by touch input, so
it is neccassary to use the sidebars for
scrolling which makes Evernote practically
unuseable without a mouse with a mouse wheel
(lot of Evernote users complain about this on
Evernote forums but have not yet found a solution.)

The same problem is present in other applications
that don't support touch input yet.

On the other hand, everything works fine if I use
a mouse wheel for scrolling but what is the point of
having a touch screen if you are forced to use a mouse
for scrolling?

I am wondering if there is a way to send mouse
wheel scrolling events to an application (in this
example to Evernote) by using the touch screen only?

For example by swiping with two/three fingers up and
down ?

Any ideas? With some custom software perhaps?
Like AutoHotkey, or something similar?

EDIT:

Here is a similar question : Detecting touch screen presses in AutoHotkey in Windows 8

Here is a possible answer:

http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/104022-remapping-touchscreen-gestures/

http://www.lovemysurface.net/touchme-gesture-studio-review/

Best Answer

I can confirm that the $4.99 (at time of writing) TouchMe Engine, with its gesture-editing windows store app TouchMe Gesture Studio, allows you to map new gestures to the mouse scroll wheel, so for example I've been using three-finger swipe up and down to drive the mouse wheel up and down, and another gesture to make the on-screen keyboard appear or disappear.

Works quite nicely, much better than no scroll at all.

My use-case is Remote Desktop (to a desktop) on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 convertible laptop, with its ultra-high-res screen - remote desktop looks like a flea circus, the scrollbar in every window within the RDP session is a very thin line, impossible to hit by touch. Add to that the lack of soft keyboard support, and something like this becomes essential.

I'm still hoping someone's going to figure out to add this to AutoHotKey in the near future, though, or at least an new open-source application along the lines of the TouchMe Engine. Proprietary (and cheap) utilities that sink their hooks into windows applications always worry me, there's no way to be sure what they're doing and there's no basis on which to trust the "brand".

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