Re: GNOME 3.2: mapping extra mouse buttons

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-03-23 at 11:27 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 01:10:27AM +0000, Sergey Udaltsov wrote:
> > Folks
> > 
> > These days there are many many mice with > 5 buttons (3 + scroll). For
> > a moment the only solution for them is not very user-friendly imwheel.
> > Would it make sense to provide mapping for those extra buttons? On
> > windows, people use them for switching apps, copy/paste, back/forward
> > etc. Why cannot we provide comfortable GUI for that configuration?
> > Could it be done within keyboard panel - or do we need extra panel (or
> > extra tab in the "Mouse" panel)? Should we map "buttons->actions" or
> > "buttons->keys" (so shortcuts would be picked automatically)?
> 
> having an implementation for keys in the wacom driver, I can assure you that
> mapping buttons to keys is painful. it's probably less so in the client, but
> in the driver all we know is keycodes and they may or may not map to
> actual keysyms. so a simple Ctrl+Q will fail for layout us,fr, not even
> counting the myriads of options.
> 
> now, gnome is obviously more aware of keyboard layout changes than the
> driver is (who doesn't know at all) but I'd still be careful of button ->
> key mappings.
> 
> mapping buttons to actions would likely be easier.

To be honest, I'm not sure this is something we want to mess with at all
in the system settings.