Re: [gtk-list] Re: wheel support, was: Re: Plans for 1.3/1.4

[Paul Barton-Davis <pbd op net>]

>I would also like to request support for scrolling with the Logitech Trackman
>Marble FX.  For those of you that don't know, it's a 4-button trackball.  With

 ...

>In both cases, when the ball is used for scrolling, the cursor does not move.
>This particular bit may be difficult to do in X; I don't know enough of how it
>handles the cursor to be sure.  Anyway, this is one of the main features of
>Windows that I miss; i would greatly appreciate if it was added to GTK.  I'm
>willing to help with this, but I'm not sure how useful I can be, since I don't
>know much about X programming.

It almost certainly has to be done in the X server. I have a trackman
marble fx. It doesn't generate any particularly different messages
when button 4 is pressed than when its not, so the server needs to
keep the button state, and translate the ball motion events into
something else when it knows that the button is pressed. This is not
particularly hard, but is more appropriate for someone in the XFree86
group to do, since it might have some subtle implications for other
aspects of pointer handling.

Its nothing really to do with GTK, although I suppose that if you
could get the 4th button events at user-level, you could in theory do
this kind of remapping of motion events yourself.

--p