GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 687557
Enable two-finger-scrolling for vertical and horizontal axes, with one checkbox
Last modified: 2013-04-19 09:33:50 UTC
Hello! With the GNOME 3.6 Release the settings for mice and touchpads are merged from the former two tab panes into one. The former tab for touchpads offered checkboxes for use of two-finger scrolling (by default only vertical) and also horizontal two-finger-scrolling. The later checkbox is missing in Gnome 3.6. This is the lost of a important feature. It can now only be enabled by experienced users via dconf. I'm afraid this is part of the GNOME "make things nice and easy, lets remove features"-thinking. Yes, that is criticism. But I wonder why the inversive scrolling is added? Proposal: It is common sense to use two-finger-scrolling for both, vertical and horizontal axes. I think the best solution is, to set both vertical and horizontal to active, if "two-finger-scrolling" is enabled. That will remove the need of a second checkbox for "two-finger-scrolling for the horizontal axes too". I'don't see a reason why someboy want only two-finger-scrolling for the vertical axes, but not for the horizontal. Thats inconsistent. The typically user wants both. In the case the user want only "vertical two-finger-scrolling" we can offer still dconf to switch "horizontal two-finger-scrolling" off. This will give the users what the want (and expect) and doesn't clutter the UI. Thank you for reading (and thinking) about this.
I fully agree with Peter! If the GNOME project wants to be competitive it should Add/reorganize features, not just remove them ;) If you want to keep a nice interface, it's ok, and I agree with you, a nice interface is lovable :) But at least instead of removing features you could add an "Advanced" button which opens a window or something else where everybody can set "advanced" options easily and nicely without the need to use that ugly dconf-editor and gnome-terminal :)
To answer your generall point: The major problem of GNOME3 is, and was never, the GNOME-Shell. It is just the constant removal of basic and loved features during the complete 3.x series. The missing Type-Ahead-Find and Split-Panel in Nautilus invoked four different forks within this autumn/winter. I'm not happy about this forks, but what should the people do? In this case, we don't need and "experts button". The problem with dconf is, if a feature is moved their, it very likely broken in future because no developers will care about testing that feature anymore. Honestly, this bug is about this special problem and we shouldn't confront the special developer(s) how are fond about the mouse-settings with this generall issue. "Hello developer *wavehand*" :-)
You are right Peter, sorry, it's not the right place for this type of complaints :)
I can confirm this option is missing from the touchpad section of gnome-control-center (I'm running 3.6.2 on Fedora 18). I can however still enable horizontal scrolling manually by entering xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 1 No need for dconf.
Note that it's also the case for normal edge scrolling. While vertical scrolling works fine, horizontal scrolling does not (and there is no option to turn it back on). Why wouldn't both be on by default anyhow?
Because devs doesn't respond till now ;-)
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 687509 ***