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Since unfortunately Gnome does not offer any option to configure additional mouse buttons I used to achieve this simple goal by writing a tedious configuration file for xbindkeys.

What I wanted was far from super fancy stuff – as launching a rocket by hitting a mouse button – but only switching workspace by left or right clicking the scroll wheel of my Logitech mouse.

How this is done under Xorg has been answered many times, here for example: How to configure extra buttons in Logitech Mouse

But with Ubuntu 21.04 where – buckle up! – Wayland has become the default display manager, as of now fancy pancy things like xbindkeysand xdotool do not work anymore.

So my question: is there a way to launch missiles – ehm, sorry switch work spaces with my extra mouse button again? Or should I sell them and donate the money to Gnome Fondation?

Please do not propose libratbag and piper, I never got them working in any useful way...

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  • That wayland has become the default (not the first time, btw) doesn't mean that you can't keep using the old xorg.
    – ChanganAuto
    Apr 27, 2021 at 21:08
  • @ChanganAuto Rightly said, Sir! And I'm stuck with Xorg for that very reason. But there a indubitably some good reasons to switch to Wayland and the mouse buttons are the hurdle that hundred me to follow them and jump back to the future of Ubuntu 17.10 (was it 17.10?).
    – user5950
    Apr 27, 2021 at 21:22
  • You could install Solaar. It has some configuration things for various Logitech mice. Otherwise, some Logitech settings, when set in Windows, carry over to Ubuntu.
    – heynnema
    Apr 27, 2021 at 23:11
  • @guiverc Thanks for pointing this out and giving me the guidance I needed. I edited the question to bring in more in line and removed the thorn I put into communities eye.
    – user5950
    Apr 27, 2021 at 23:12
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    @heynnema The editor is not available for my mouse (M510) and the documentation says: »Note that rule processing is only available when running under X11.«
    – user5950
    Apr 27, 2021 at 23:30

2 Answers 2

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The most comfortable solution I found is key-mapper. This applications allows you, to map mouse buttons to shortcuts. I for example use it to switch workspace with the left and right click of my scroll wheel, what fits particularly good with the horizontal layout of workspaces in GNOME 40+:

enter image description here

As you can see, the program comes with a GUI.

Unfortunately it's not in the Ubuntu sources, but you can download an official DEB packages from here: https://github.com/sezanzeb/key-mapper/releases

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0

Adding to @user5950 's answer, the app is now called input-remapper, in case anyone is still searching about this, like me

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