Higher precision (smoothness) touchpad scrolling

Question

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.

Answer 1

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.