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2

I've recently switched to Ubuntu, and the one thing that has been bothering me is the scroll speed, which I can't seem to change. In windows I used to have it set around 7 lines, but it seem to be around 3 on Ubuntu, and unchangeable. How can I change the speed?

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4 Answers

up vote 14 down vote accepted

You mean for the whole system, or just for web browsing?

If its only for web, you can change the scroll speed in FireFox:

Type enter about:config in the address bar

Find and change mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines to FALSE

Then change the mousewheel.withnokey.numlines from 1 to whatever you want.

For a more general, system-wide solution, i can research further...

EDIT

By the way... are you using a mouse with a scroll wheel, or a laptop/netbook with a touchpad with edge-scrolling? If the latter, what model?

EDIT

System-wide? I was fearing that...

If you are using a laptop, there is some hope. Depending on what brand is your touchpad, there are drivers for it, like GPointingDeviceSettings (GSynaptics successor)

If not...

Currently Gnome offers no way for a user to adjust a mouse wheel speed, as one can see here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/gtk/+bug/124440

(its a known wanted feature, triaged as WishList)

So the only way would be to use some hacks, or really dig deep into a mess of configuration files, and possibly some recompiles. Not fun if you need to adjust the value until you find a confortable one.

Sorry for the bad news. If you really need it, i could dig further for possible workarounds.

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For the whole system. – Kironide Feb 20 '11 at 16:34
1  
Just unplug and plug again the mouse connector. It worked for me. – Airton Sobral May 10 '12 at 19:34
1  
Yes. It did worked for me too. I was using a wireless mouse. First I tried to switch off & on the mouse power, but that didnt help. Then I unplugged the usb adapter, waited for a few seconds and then plugged in again. – user81089 Aug 3 '12 at 16:09
up vote 8 down vote

OMG, all you have to do is unplug the mouse (mine was wireless), and then plug it back in to fix this issue.

I was searching for a long time for this fix and even rebooted the machine to no avail. Maybe a full shutdown would have fixed the issue.

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This worked for me as well. It's a little annoying that I have to do this on every startup, but oh well, at least it works. – fish Sep 26 '12 at 11:26
A full shutdown didn't work for me but, unplugging and replugging worked! I hope I don't have to do this every restart cycle. – TechplexEngineer Nov 18 '12 at 14:04
Wow, this worked for me too with a Microsoft Wireless mouse that was scrolling far too fast. I unplugged the bluetooth dongle and re-plugged it and scrolling became perfect. Amazing that the fix was this simple. – Gerry Nov 24 '12 at 8:46
up vote 5 down vote

For Ubuntu 12.10 I found that it it a little different for the Firefox work around.

Open about:config (type it into the address bar) and search for:

mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount

Then change the number associated with it. Mine was set to 5. I changed it to 60 and it works how I want it now.

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Thanks! I found that option myself but didn't try that high a number, just something like 10. But together with smooth scrolling it seems that much higher numbers are in order to reach barely sufficient scroll speeds. Currently got mine set to 100. – nem75 Jan 11 at 12:40
up vote 1 down vote

In Firefox 19, run about:config in the address bar, then modify the parameter mousewheel.min_line_scroll_amount to something higher (50). You don't have to restart FF.

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