Ubuntu – Wacom tablet middle mouse button scrolling

graphics-tabletmousemouse scroll

So I recently got a Wacom Bamboo Pen graphics tablet, which is wonderful. I've been trying it out as a general purpose mouse on my 14.04 laptop. The only annoyance is scrolling. The tablet has no scroll wheel nor scroll buttons, and moving to the scroll bar on the screen is really very annoying.

I remember using Windows you could click the middle mouse button to "autoscroll", which would be amazing with a tablet—it's exactly the sort of solution I want. I can't however, for the life of me work out how to implement this system-wide on Ubuntu.

I am aware that there are Chrome and Firefox extensions/options for enabling this for those browsers, but I would love something system wide. I understand that middle-click is "supposed to be" copy/paste on Linux, but when I have Ctrl+C/V I really don't need another clipboard, what I need is easy scrolling.

Any other solutions for simple scrolling with a graphics tablet would be much appreciated too. A keyboard shortcut perhaps?

Best Answer

I wanted to enable scroll/pan actions in my wacom, like we do in Windows by pressing the mouse middle button and move the mouse to up and down. To do this:

  1. First I listed the devices using xsetwacom --list devices:
$ xsetwacom --list devices
Wacom Intuos S Pen stylus           id: 14  type: STYLUS    
Wacom Intuos S Pen eraser           id: 15  type: ERASER    
Wacom Intuos S Pen cursor           id: 16  type: CURSOR    
Wacom Intuos S Pad pad              id: 17  type: PAD
  1. Since I wanted to enable scroll/pan using the lower button in wacon pen (Button 2), I used the command below (where "pan" is the value to enable the feature in Button 2)
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos S Pen stylus" Button 2 "pan"

  1. To test, go to your browser or any other document, drag the pen to up/down/left/ right while you click the pen Button 2.

  2. To increase the sensitivity, I decreased the value of "PanScrollThreshold" parameter (the default value was 1300)

xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos S Pen stylus" "PanScrollThreshold" 200

References:

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