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Is it currently possible to make touchpad scrolling more precise?

I know the underlying reason for the scolling jumpiness is that the scrolling itself is sent as mouse button (4, 5, 6, 7) events, making it large and discrete.

Perhaps something is already implemented somewhere that would allow to process touchpad-based scrolling in the same way as pointer movement is processed? For at least few applications (e.g. firefox), as it wouldn't be possible to automatically do that for all of them.

Or, maybe, it is possible to set the scrolling step on the touchpad and in the applications very small? There'd be the event-flood problem but probably not very critical.

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  • FYI: On my laptop touchpad (built-in "AlpsPS/2 GlidePoint"), I get the smooth scrolling you're talking about when I move my finger up and down the right edge in Gedit and Evince. (On Ubuntu 14.04.)
    – user29020
    Commented Jul 2, 2014 at 18:37
  • Furthermore, using Firefox 30: my touchpad does not do the kind of smooth scrolling you're looking for, at least on Ubuntu 14.04. Even enabling "smooth scrolling" in FF does not change the large jumps; it only makes in shift smoothly between the mouse event jumps, rather than scrolling by how much I moved my finger.
    – user29020
    Commented Jul 2, 2014 at 18:40

1 Answer 1

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A partial answer is:

id=`xinput list | grep -Po "[Tt]ouch[^=]*id=[0-9]+" | grep -Po [0-9]+`
prop_id=`xinput --list-props $id | grep -P ".*[^C][^i][^r][^c][^u][^l][^a][^r]\sScrolling Distance" | grep -Po '\([0-9]+\)' | grep -Po "[0-9]+"`
xinput --set-prop "$id" "$prop_id" 15 15

to make the scrolling step smaller; after that, in Firefox there are mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_x and mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y which can be changed to make the scolling distance on each step smaller as well.

Setting the scrolling distance much less than 15 (in my case) makes scrolling in quite a few applications unusable.

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