Monday, April 18, 2011

GNOME 3.0 middle mouse button emulation

This is essentially a GNOME 3.0-specific update to New evdev middle mouse button emulation defaults. In recent evdev versions, middle mouse button emulation is disabled by default and can be enabled with Option "Emulate3Buttons" "on" in the xorg.conf file or an xorg.conf.d snippet.

GNOME 3.0 has a gsettings key to also trigger this behaviour on a per-user basis (see bug 633863). The default value is off (false). Settings applied from the desktop environment overwrite xorg.conf(.d) settings, so to get middle button emulation in GNOME simply toggle the gsettings key and don't worry about xorg.conf(.d). The command to toggle the key is:


$> gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.mouse \
middle-button-enabled true


Since this gsettings are persistent, setting the key once is sufficient. It will be applied after login, for each device and as new devices are hot-plugged.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you very much for this tip. I just upgraded to Mint 12 (from Ubuntu) and I didn't realize how much I used the 3rd button emulation feature until I didn't have it.

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