permanently
To remap mouse buttons permanently, you can use the xinput set-button-map command. Every mouse button click issues a button click with a specific id to X11. X11 recognizes the following buttons:
| ID | Button |
|---|---|
| 1 | Left click |
| 2 | Middle click |
| 3 | Right click |
| 4 | Wheel up |
| 5 | Wheel down |
| 6 | Wheel left |
| 7 | Wheel right |
| 8 | Thumb1 |
| 9 | Thumb2 |
| 10 | ExtBt7 |
| 11 | ExtBt8 |
You can use the following command to remap the buttons:
xinput set-button-map <device-id> <button1> <button2> <button3> … <buttonN>The <device-id> is shown in the xinput list output – you can use the name as a string or the id number. You can query the actual button state using xinput query-state <device-id>.
So the default configuration (xinput set-button-map <device-id> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) would give you the normal behavior. But if you prefer e.g. having the thumb buttons for WheelLeft and WheelRight, you would run this command:
# input id: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
xinput set-button-map <device-id> 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7This would map buttons 8→6 and 9→7 and vice versa.
To automatically set your preferred mapping on bootup, you can add the line to System → Preferences → Startup Applications (formerly Sessions).
per application (Wheel/Thumb only)
To remap wheel-/thumb-mouse buttons per application, you can use imwheel from the same-named package. After installing the package, copy the default configuration to your homedir:
cp /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc ~/.imwheelrcAnd then enable the automatic starting upon start of X11 by editing /etc/X11/imwheel/startup.conf and changing the IMWHEEL_START value to 1.
Now you can modify your .imwheelrc to fit your needs. The format is
"window regexp"
Modifier, Mousebutton, Keypresses/Mousebutton
…So for example to use the WheelLeft and WheelRight buttons to switch tabs in Firefox, you could use the following definition:
"^Firefox-bin$"
# Flip between browser tabs
None, Left, Control_L|Page_Up
None, Right, Control_L|Page_DownThis would map WheelLeft to Ctrl–PgUp and WheelRight to Ctrl–PgDn.
A Modifier of None means, this only works if no modifier (Shift_L, Shift_R, Control_L, Control_R, Alt_L, Alt_R) is pressed while clicking. If you leave this empty, the mapping works regardless of which modifier is held down.
Use this to go to previous/next track in Rhythmbox using the WheelLeft and WheelRight clicks:
"^Rhythmbox$"
None, Left, Alt_L|Left
None, Right, Alt_L|Right(In this case, Rhythmbox defines the window resource name since Rhythmbox itself puts the currently playing song in the title bar. You could also match against rhythmbox which is the window class name. Since imwheel -c wasn’t able to show them to me, I just guessed.)
imwheel causes some problems when scrolling in Opera: The webpage doesn’t get redrawn so that you have blank or garbled areas when scrolling. Also you have to click on an area to scroll it. (i.e. if you have a webpage with a textarea, the scrollwheel will scroll the textarea even if the pointer is outside of it until you click the area outside the textarea). To get back the original behavior, comment out the lines for Opera in your .imwheelrc or add an @Exclude rule.
is it possible to simulate a double click? Can you whip up a script to convert a particular button press into a 2 left clicks?
There is an utility called “xprop” that allows you to click on a window and extract a lot of information. It’s useful to know the class name of it. I’ve needed to use it in Ubuntu and Linux Mint because “imwheel -c” seems to be broken.
There’s also “xev”, which shows information about the keys pressed in the keyboard and the mouse. Useful to know the “keysyms” that you need in the imwheel’s configuration file.