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12.04 has smooth scrolling enabled for touchpads with GTK. I was wondering if it could be enabled for mouse wheels too? If yes, how? If not, why not? Thanks.

CruelAngel
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5 Answers5

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While true smooth per-pixel scrolling would not work that well with a mouse scroll wheel, having a smooth animation rather than a sudden jump of three lines would be nice.

I don't know of any way to do that globally but in Firefox it is an option under Preferences->Advanced.

For Chromium/Chrome it is currently enabled via a flag by going to chrome://flags.

Eliah Kagan
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user71280
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I wish smooth scrolling could be enabled EVERYWHERE, sadly smooth scrolling can not be enabled for mouse wheels because they have "jumps" whereas the scroll input from a touchpad is precise enough to register pixel-for-pixel motion.

To test this out, fire up a terminal and run

xev

Then place the cursor in the window and scroll up and down. You will notice that the key (button 4 and 5) registers output continually as long as you move your fingers. Now scroll with the click-wheel. It will only register once per mouse-wheel click.

Some mouse-wheels do not have distinct "jumps" when rolling but I'll bet that the hardware reads the distance travelled by the roller, and sends jumps just like other mice to insure hardware compatibility.

Gruzzles
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Well I have found a hack to scroll smoothly, I have tested it in multiple apps such as document viewer, gedit, nautilus file manager, etc.

This is not a prank or a scam. This is legit.

Move your mouse cursor to the right edge so that it is above the scroll bar, which is on the right edge of any window (hover anywhere on the right edge where the scroll bar is present), and then just scroll.

For some reason this just works and scrolls smoothly. But I think if this can be made to work, it is also possible to enable it in the other apps without much change.

Sometimes this doesn't work so good when the scroll list is too big in nautilus file manager.

I request you to please share this and make people more aware about this smooth scrolling, so that finally smooth scrolling comes to Ubuntu. Everyone is tired of not being able to scroll smoothly.

Abhay Patil
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Whether or not it's a hardware issue depends on the hardware itself... Logitech provides Windows drivers with smooth scrolling for mice with a "free scrolling wheel" (no jumps, just a wheel scrolling event for every pixel).

It'd be really awesome if I could use my M500 to it's full potential, but xev shows the typical jumps after a certain distance, so it's probably a driver issue. Not sure whom to bother and where to fix that.

nacs
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I found a way to enable smooth kinetic, physics based scrolling in Ubuntu (Or any x11 desktop)

Simply install from the .deb on the Momentum Mouse repo

Includes a GUI for updating settings, fine tune the physics in any way you want!

It works by emulating a trackpad, creating a virtual device which intercepts the chosen mouse's scroll events, and emitting physics based events that make the interface move like MacOS.

Hope this works for you!

Ash Martian
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