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Re: Wheelmouse



Pigeon wrote:
> Jamin W. Collins wrote:
> > TMK, imwheelrc hasn't been needed for some time now.  XFree86 v4.x
> > versions support the wheel mice directly AFAIK.
> 
> They're supposed to, but it's often easier to set up with imwheel. One
> advantage is you can edit imwheelrc and then restart imwheel from
> within X, which is easier for experimenting than having to stop X,
> edit XF86Config and restart X.
> 
> Another advantage is that imwheel allows you to have the wheels
> behaving differently in different applications, in case you find that
> useful.

Hint: If you think your wheel mouse is not working then don't install
imwheel because it won't help.  Get your wheel working first, then if
you want to try imwheel feel free to give it a try.

Just to give a counter point.  When I first learned of imwheel I
thought I needed it in order to get the wheelmouse working.  (Which is
not true.)  I installed it.  And then was confused by the behavior.
The applications were never seeing wheelmouse events!  They were all
getting eaten by the imwheel program.  I had not realized the purpose
of the imwheel program.  It does not make the wheel work if it is not
working.  It adapts the wheel for other purposes.  Such as for old
legacy programs which don't know about the wheel.

Just to be clear for the readers and archive, imwheel translates wheel
events into non-wheel events such as [page-up] and [page-down].  Back
in the day before wheelmice existed no program had support for those
extra button events.  At that time imwheel was an adaptor to make
something which was not supported work in a similar way to the way it
should work.  But that time has past.  That is NOT what I wanted at
all in recent years.  I needed to generate wheelmouse events so that
applications could use them.  The imwheel program actually got in the
way of that by eating them and translating them.  I can't recommend it
to people today.  I think most people install it thinking it is
something that is needed to make the wheel work at all and that is
just simply a misunderstanding of the program.

Bob

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