Mouse Scrolling – How to Scroll the Screen Using the Middle Click

mousescrolling

On Windows, most programs with large, scrollable text containers (e.g. all browsers, most word processors and IDEs) let you press the middle mouse button and then move the mouse to scroll. This scrolling is smooth and allows you to scroll very quickly using just the mouse.

When I've used Linux on laptops, two-finger scrolling performs roughly the same function; it's easy to scroll down a page quickly (much more quickly than one can by scrolling a mouse wheel) but the scrolling remains smooth enough to allow precise positioning.

I am unsure how to achieve the same thing when running Linux on a Desktop with a mouse. As far as I can tell after a whole bunch of Googling, there are neither application-specific settings to swap to Windows-style middle mouse button behaviour, nor any system-wide settings to achieve the same effect.

Just to make this concrete, let's say – if it's relevant – that I'm asking in the context of Firefox, Google Chrome, Gedit and Eclipse on a recent version of either Mint (what I use at home) or Ubuntu (what I use at work). I suspect this is a fairly distro-agnostic and application-agnostic question, though.

As far as I can tell, my options for scrolling are:

Scroll with the mousewheel – slow!
Use the PgUp / PgDn keys – jumps a huge distance at a time so can't be used for precise positioning, and is less comfortable than using the mouse
Drag the scroll bar at the right hand side of the screen up and down like I used to do on old Windows PCs with two-button mice. This is what I do in practice, but it's just plain less comfortable than Windows-style middle-mouse scrolling; on a huge widescreen, it takes me most of a second just to move the cursor over from the middle of the screen to the scrollbar, and most of a second to move it back again, and I have to take my eyes off the content I'm actually scrolling to do this.

None of these satisfy me! This UI issue is the single thing that poisons my enjoyment of Linux on desktops and almost makes me wish I was using a laptop touchpad instead of a mouse. It irritates me enough that I've concluded that either I'm missing some basic Linux UI feature that solves this problem, or I'm just an oversensitive freak and it doesn't even bother anyone else – but I'm not sure which.

So my questions are:

Does Windows-style middle mouse button scrolling exist anywhere in the Linux world, or is it really purely a Windows thing? In particular, do any Linux web browsers let you use Windows-style scrolling?
Are there any mechanisms for scrolling pages that exist in Linux but not in Windows, especially ones that perform the role I've described?
Any other solutions that I'm missing?

Best Answer

The feature you are talking about is called "Auto-Scrolling". It lets you press and hold the middle mouse button and move your mouse to scroll smoothly. In Linux, the default behavior for this action (pressing middle mouse button) is generally pasting text.

However, there is a preference setting in Firefox and an extension available for Chrome/Chromium which would let you use the middle mouse button for scrolling and activate this feature.

Firefox

Open the "Options" tab: "≡" (Open menu) → "Options".
Navigate to "General" (it should open to "General" by default).
Scroll down to "Browsing". Under "Browsing", you will find the "Use autoscrolling" option. Put a check mark beside this to activate this functionality in Firefox.

Or just search for "autoscrolling" using the search bar.

Chrome/Chromium

For Chrome/Chromium we can use an Extension called "AutoScroll" (from kaescripts.blogspot.com).

Go to this link on Chrome Web Store (obviously using Chrome/Chromium).
Click on the button labeled "+ ADD TO CHROME" to install this extension.
Click on "Add" in the Confirmation Dialog Box.

Other Applications

As far as other applications are concerned, I haven't yet found a solution for them. Anyways, it's the tall webpages that create most of the problems for which both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium have a solution.

Related Solutions

Gnome Mouse – Make Mouse Movements Scroll When Middle Button is Held Down

This Windows feature has never really made its way into the Unix world. In the Unix world, the primary purpose of the middle mouse button is to paste the clipboard content (or more precisely, text selected with the mouse, which is auto-copied). A couple of cross-platform applications such as Firefox and Chrome that support Linux-style middle mouse button under Windows and vice versa, but other than that most applications don't support this kind of fine-grained scrolling.

Nonetheless, you can get fairly close at the system level. It is possible to set up a mouse button such that when it is pressed, mouse movements are transformed into wheel events. This is the same feature that you're used to, but you're likely to find the motion choppy, because applications receive wheel events, which are typically interpreted as scrolling by one whole line or column.

To play with this configuration, use the xinput program (I don't know if there's a GUI frontend for it). First, run the following command to see the name of your pointing device:

$ xinput --list       
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Generic USB Mouse                         id=8    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Macintosh mouse button emulation          id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                         id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳   USB Keyboard                            id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]

For example, in the output above, the pointer device is Generic USB mouse. You can run the following command to list the properties that can be tuned:

xinput --list-props 'Generic USB Mouse'

The set of properties you're looking for are the “Evdev Wheel Emulation” ones. With the following settings, when the middle mouse button (button 2) is pressed, moving the mouse sends wheel events (4=up, 5=down, 6=left, 7=right).

xinput --set-prop 'Generic USB Mouse' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation' 1
xinput --set-prop 'Generic USB Mouse' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 2
xinput --set-prop 'Generic USB Mouse' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes' 6 7 4 5

You may want to tweak other parameters (inertia, timeout).

You can put these commands in a script. Add #!/bin/sh as the very first line, and make the script file executable (e.g. chmod +x ~/bin/activate-wheel-emulation.sh). Then add that script to the list of commands to run when your session starts (gnome-session-properties lets you configure that).

If you have root access and you want to make the change for all users (acceptable on a home machine), it's simpler to do it via the X.org server configuration file. As root, create a file called /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/wheel-emulation.conf containing settings for the mouse driver. The settings are the same but they're organized a bit differently.

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Wheel Emulation"
    MatchProduct "Generic USB Mouse"
    Option "EmulateWheel" "on"
    Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
    Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
    Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

How to configure a Trackpoint, so middle-click scrolling is not misinterpreted as a middle-click paste

Here is the Ubuntu Wiki entry on how to disable the middle mouse button. This should work on any system using X.

Example: Disabling middle-mouse button paste on a scrollwheel mouse

Scrollwheel mice support a middle-button click event when pressing the scrollwheel. This is a great feature, but you may find it irritating. Fortunately it can be disabled.

First, you need to know the id of the mouse, like this:
$ xinput list | grep 'id='

"Virtual core pointer"  id=0    [XPointer]
"Virtual core keyboard" id=1    [XKeyboard]
"AT Translated Set 2 keyboard"  id=2    [XExtensionKeyboard]
"Macintosh mouse button emulation"      id=3    [XExtensionPointer]
"Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse"       id=4    [XExtensionPointer]
My mouse has the Logitech logo printed on it, so I gather I need the last entry.

I can view the current button mapping thusly:
$ xinput get-button-map 4

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 10
Really, only the first three numbers have meaning for me. They represent the left, middle, and right mouse buttons.
$ xinput get-button-map 4
I can turn the middle mouse button off by setting it to 0:
$ xinput set-button-map 4 1 0 3
Or I can turn the middle-mouse button into a left-mouse button by setting it to 1:
$ xinput set-button-map 4 1 1 3
To make this set on a per-user basis, I can plug that line into my ~/.xstartup or other init file. It can also be done via configuring a matching InputClass section on xorg.conf.

The above example does not disable scrolling; if you want to do that see here.