sc0ty/scroll-daemon

Use touchpad (or any mouse device) for scrolling only

Scroll Daemon

Use any mouse device (touchpad, trackpad etc.) for scrolling only.

But why?

In my Thinkpad there is both touchpad and trackpad installed. I am controlling cursor with trackpad. With this daemon I can now use touchpad for scrolling only.

Other solutions

You can configure your trackpad scrolling zones to be 100% area of the device. I was using this solution, but since Google Chrome 49.0 scroll started acting funny. It was main reason to make this daemon.

Compilation & installation

Under any Linux distribution:

make
make install

It will install daemon in "/usr/local/bin". You could change destination folder using PREFIX variable:

make install PREFIX=/my/dest/dir

Usage

1. First you need to find mouse device corresponding to your device. It will be one of /dev/input/mouseX. Try cat /dev/input/mouse0 and move cursor to see if it will generate something.
2. Disable this device in your window manager configuration or in xorg.conf.
3. Run daemon (as root): scroll-daemon /dev/input/mouseX 5 5 -rlm. It will register new mouse psmouse-scroll in your system.
4. Make sure that new mouse is enabled in your window manager.
5. Test scroll speed, change options as you wish. For more information run scroll-daemon --help.
6. You may wish to add this to /etc/rc.local (for global autostart) or to your user profile autostart. Add & at the end of the line to make it run in background. Note that user starting this daemon must have read rights to mouse device and write rights to /dev/uinput (it usually means root).
7. Consider using one of /dev/input/by-id/*-mouse or /dev/input/by-path/*-mouse devices. It will assure that your device will be identified correctly. Your devices could be numbered differently.