14.04 Compiz button press lost

Question

I use buttons 6 and 7 (mouse wheel pushed sideways) to rotate the compiz cube. That worked find until yesterday when I upgraded to 14.04.

After the upgrade the button presses worked correctly if the mouse was hovering over the desktop but were lost if the mouse was over any window. I've had a good look around but couldn't find a bug that matched this behavior.

My current solution uses xbindkeys and xdotool - it's a horrible hack:

# move left
"xdotool key ctrl+alt+Left"
  b:6

# move right
"xdotool key ctrl+alt+Right"
  b:7

Basically kicking off the keyboard shortcuts to change desktop using a script activated by the mouse.

Apart from being a horrible hack it also slows down the rate I can change desktop.

I tried using ccsm's "Commands" tool to map to the xdotool commands but it obviously had exactly the same problem that it only worked with the mouse over the desktop.

What's going on with compiz is this a manifestation of a know bug?

Answer 1

Apparently, recent versions of Compiz won't bind the mouse wheel (buttons 4-7) for windows other than the desktop unless a modifier key is configured (SHIFT, ALT etc.).

This was even more restricted, so that no special mouse buttons were bound, but that was fixed about a month ago (see bug #1304877 for details). Now at least buttons > 7 can be used again. Buttons 4-7, however, are explicitly ungrabbed if the current window is not the desktop (see the diff of the commit linked in the bug report above).