GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 614710
Should be able to choose different handedness for touchpad and mouse
Last modified: 2010-10-19 22:10:26 UTC
I'm running GNOME on a laptop with a USB mouse connected in addition to the built-in ALPS touchpad. I want to configure the touchpad as a right-handed device and the external mouse as a left-handed device; however, GNOME only supports a single handedness setting shared by all pointer devices. Furthermore, I can't change the mouse's ButtonMapping manually using a hal fdi file because g-s-d will just undo my changes to enforce its own handedness setting. The only workaround I can find is to disable g-s-d's mouse plugin, which means I lose the convenience of configuring pointer settings through gnome-mouse-properties. I propose the addition of a new preference that allows g-s-d to set the handedness of touchpad devices differently than the handedness of non-touchpad devices.
Also, I think this is a separate bug from bug 86895. Implementing that feature request would also fix this one, but I'm not suggesting configuring pointer devices on a device-by-device basis, I'm just suggesting splitting the currently global setting into two global settings, one for all touchpads and one for all other devices.
What's the reason why you would want separate handedness for touchpad and mouse?
I keep my laptop on far-right side of my desk at home. I'm naturally a righty, but I taught myself to use a mouse left-handed, and I'd like to do that with my laptop to save room on my desk and reduce strain on my right hand. However, I still find it more comfortable to keep the touchpad right-handed. I also want to make it easier for others to use my laptop by keeping the touchpad set up in the more traditional manner. (Many people seem to find a left-handed touchpad quite confusing to use.) I know my use case is rather unusual, and I'd be content to do some manual hal/xorg configuration if necessary, but then I'd have to disable the entire mouse component of g-s-d, meaning that I'd lose the nice GUI for setting up edge scrolling, pointer speed, etc.
You should take your bugs out of NEEDINFO in the future.
Created attachment 172733 [details] [review] mouse: Allow for a separate handed-ness for the touchpad Make it possible to set the touchpad and mouse handedness separately. The default setting is to follow the mouse setting, leaving the setting for power users to change.
Peter, could you please check this for sanity?
Review of attachment 172733 [details] [review]: aside from the strcmp to g_str_equal change which seems out of place, the patch looks fine.