Posted on 43 Comments

New Mouse & Touchpad Panel

New Mouse & Touchpad panel

GNOME Control Center is getting a new design in the near future, but firstly we need to port the panels to match the new concept. Thus I have been working on the new Mouse & Touchpad panel.

The Test Your Settings dialog is now presented within the control-center window.

What’s interesting about this concept — besides of the fresh and minimalist look & feel — is that it only shows relevant settings to you. So, for instance, it won’t have a Touchpad section if you don’t have a supported touchpad device, and so on…

Some of you might miss the double-click delay setting that used to belong to the Mouse & Touchpad panel. Don’t worry, it is now part of the Universal Access panel.

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This changes are already on master and will be included in our next release, GNOME 3.20.

After that I will be tackling the Keyboards panel. The goal is to have all panels ready for the new Control Center shell.

43 thoughts on “New Mouse & Touchpad Panel

  1. I would comment on the bug but I don’t know which one it is, so I’ll comment here.

    Please don’t merge natural scrolling for mice with natural scrolling for touchpads!
    Natural scrolling with mouse wheels is awkward and contrary to 20+ years workflow that everyone is used to, but natural scrolling for touchpad (with 2 finger scrolling and smooth scrolling) is actually pretty natural. Please allow choosing regular scrolling for mouse and natural scrolling for touchpad (the GSettings allows this already), or leave natural scrolling out of the mouse altogheter.

    1. Thanks. I agree with you. I will discuss your point with the designers and we may update it.

      1. I use a Trackball, and there is no “natural” direction. I think it would be a big mistake to merge mouse scroll direction with touchpad scroll direction.

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  2. This looks really nice! Well done!

    I have a Lenovo Yoga laptop, which has a clickpad (i.e. a touchpad with integrated physical buttons; the buttons aren’t visible but you can press the touchpad and it will move downwards). This clickpad has both a left and a right button, but it’s pretty difficult to tell the two buttons apart as there is no physical separator between them. As a consequence, I often press “right” when I want to press “left”. This type of clickpad is pretty common so I wouldn’t be surprised if many people have the same issue.

    Since it’s possible to generate a “right” click using two fingers, it would be great if there was an option for merging “left” and “right” button to just be a “left” button. This is also how things work on Macs.

    1. I agree with Søren.

      It would be great if there was an option to change the default behaviour of the bottom right click on trackpad!

      Thanks!

  3. Please consider adding separate toggles for horizontal and vertical touchpad edge scrolling. Synaptics exposes them separately as VertEdgeScroll and HorizEdgeScroll. I use vertical edge scrolling all the time but horizontal scrolling is _really_ annoying on click pads (in this case a macbook). I have a really hard time clicking on e.g. Firefox’s tabs because more often than not my click gets misrepresented as a horizonal scroll, and this make Firefox scroll inside the tabs, causeing me to open a different one than I wanted to.

  4. Will this also include some new features or only change of what is already in? What i find missing is the ability to assign different actions to logitech mouse with several more buttons other then left, right and scroll…

  5. A nice way to disable mouse acceleration would be good. I like having 1:1 with my mouse.

    1. +1

  6. Please, PLEASE add the fucking mouse acceleration option. I have to run a script for turning off mouse accel. It’s 2015!!!!!!!!

    1. +1. I’ve never used mouse acceleration in my life and that’s the first thing to disable on every system I own. It would be nice to have a separate acceleration settings for mouse and touchpad.

  7. Maybe adding option to disable mouse acceleration? Simple toggle could make a like a lot easier.

  8. please, consider adding a *Gamepads/Joystick* panel! 🙂

  9. It would be nice to add touchpad touch to click delay trigger. Because right now, with touch to tap, i have huge amount of accidental “clicks” events during typing on the laptop.

    I’m not sure whether it is due to some super sensitivity of the pad. There is some synaptic setting for activating touchpad after typing on the keyboard.

  10. Does it handle back/forward mouse buttons yet? (4th and 5th buttons)

  11. I also would love a mouse acceleration option. Even if it only supports libinput and drops legacy support it would be great to control from Gnome directly.

  12. I agree with the two above posters – it is frustrating not to be able to turn off mouse acceleration. I’m all for making the gnome desktop experience approachable for new, novice, or “everyday” users. I think a ‘checkbox” to disable acceleration would be great.

    Quite frustrating otherwise.

  13. Kudos. That must have been a lot of work.
    I too want to ask for more detailed settings. now that we have the space we might as well use it.
    And maybe something that allows applications to add their own settings?I would love to have at least some of my nvidia settings there.

    And my last request. I’m not saying this out of hatred or As why I’m ditching GNOME(I’m not:). I do love GNOME but You are dumbing things down a little too much. please don’t dumb things down anymore.

    1. Another thought. Completely separate mouse and touchpad settings? or show them side by side? or maybe put a button that allows copying settings from one to the other?

  14. Guys! I’m a gamer and I struggle of poor pointer settings. I don’t need pointer acceleration at all, I only need to be able to change pointer’s speed. Gnome doesn’t allow me to do it. I need to input some strange command (“xinput …”) every time I log in. I don’t know whether libinput is guilty or anyrhing else, just give me possibility to edit pointer’s speed, not acceleration!

  15. What about a real, system-wide and consistent wheel-based smooth scrolling experience?

    I think we are well beyond the “jumping scroll” era now and, in this regard, the OSX experience is really good: this is probably the only one thing I personally envy OSX users for.

    Currently there is some inconsistent, plain-flat, basic smooth scroll while scrolling ON the scrollbars themselves in apps such as Nautilus, but scrolling the window content itself still go with the ugly, row-based jumping behavior.

    It’s inconsistent because after playing a bit with it (say shift-click-scroll for enabling the precise scrolling), then all of a sudden the smooth scroll goes away even there and the row-based behavior is back.

  16. I think it would be great to have an option to change how many rows are scrolled with the mousewheel…

  17. It would be nice if more detailed settings (eg. locked drags, paste primary selection with 2 finger tap, etc) were exposed in dconf at least. Currently, the only way to properly configure my touchpad is to disable the touchpad module in GNOME and dropping a config file in xorg.conf.d with the desired Synaptics settings. As far as I can tell, this would not change with the proposed changes in the new touchpad settings panel.

  18. Where’s the middle-click emulation option?

  19. Hello, two comments:

    1. I have no physical handicap but I tweak double click delay pretty frequently on machines. Especially with a touchpad you want the delay longer than with a mouse. Moving this setting to Universal Access is a mistake, almost nobody will find it there (I never look into that configuration, because I have no physical issue, same as many people). It is a common setting, many people use it, just leave it in the mouse dialog.

    2. Please please please, for the love of god, add numbers to the movement speed sliders. It is so difficult and annoying to fine-tune mouse/touchpad speed in GNOME control center. Since there are no numbers, you can’t do anything more than “move the slider a bit to the left, no, too slow, a bit more to the right, no, too fast, a middle ground between the two would be ideal, but where is it, move it to the left, damn it, too slow again, …”. Not to mention that with changing movement acceleration, you move the sliders often much more than you intended, so it’s really really hard to fine tune it. With numbers, it would be much easier to remember than e.g. 1.6 value was too slow and 1.7 value was too fast, so let’s try 1.65 and it’s very easy to find that spot. Also it would be possible to remember that for one mouse I prefer having 1.65 and for a different mouse I prefer having 1.9 and change accordingly if needed. Without numbers, the slider is extremely hard to use.

    Thanks!

  20. I can understand it’s hard to detect WHERE the buttons are on the mouse is but is it hard to detect if a mouse have more than 2 buttons on it?
    If that is so, I feel like Mouse Configuration is lacking on two fronts:
    – Actual numbers on the bar to accurately determine something, from negative numbers to positive
    – Mouse speed, is that mouse acceleration?

  21. It would be great if Gnome would expose the new pointer acceleration profiles especially the 1:1 no acceleration profile.

  22. Hi Felipe!,

    I’m wondering if you can add a toggle for mouse accleration in the mouse settings of GNOME as I use my computer for playing games and mouse acceleration makes it kinda hard to aim properly at things.I’d also appreciate it greatly if you can add support fo switching the Pointer Acceleration Profile (Libinput in their latest release introduced pointer accleration profile.More can found about from this link http://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/pointer-acceleration.html) as it would make it easy to disable mouse acceleration also in Wayland.

    Kind Regards,
    Bill

  23. still no middle-click emulation?

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  25. […] Red Hatu Felipe Borges se minulý týden rozepsal o tom, jak pracuje na novém rozhraní pro nastavení myši a touchpadu v GNOME. Jedná o součást […]

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  26. For those who write and edit texts a lot, and thus use the keyboard all the time, having an option for making the mouse pointer disappear once a key is pressed is extremely convenient. This very handy functionality is automatically available for the Gnome Terminal, and thus the mouse pointer disappears if it is on the Terminal window, and a key is pressed. However, there should be an option in Control Center (or in Tweak Tool, or in an extension) to activate this functionality for ALL applications running in the Gnome Shell. Curiously, the same situation occurs in KDE.

    1. +1

      Indeed. I will discuss this proposal further.

  27. Being a left-handed touchpad, right-handed mouse user, it bugged me that touchpad and mouse can’t be set separately through “Settings -> Mouse & Touchpad”. Could you please discuss this proposal too?

    1. That’s very specific use-case. I would rather point you the gsettings for these options.

  28. Please allow also an option to choose (or not) regular scrolling for mouse. People come from Apple background are used to.
    Could you please discuss this proposal too?
    Thank you so much in advance.

  29. Please do not discard the option of “Natural scrolling” for mouse. It is painful when switching between a trackpad and a mouse. Maybe have it as a separate option for these devices. I’m sick and tired of having to hack this in /dev/input/event* and /dev/input/mice.

  30. Where are the settings to ajust the mouse wheel scroll speed? This is what user wants. How many user have a touchpad, and how many have a mouse wheel? The simplest settings are not available yet, and you wanted to create new settings for touchpads? Where are the settings for the middle button click, the 4th and 5th buttons and so on. The most people have these buttons.. First resolve this than go to the next step ..

    1. 100% true… gnome is nearly perfect but these issues were so 1999… please add a mouse wheel scroll speed option!

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  33. My suggestion is that you include an option very used by notebook users:
    A checkbox to disable touchpad when USB mouse is plugged in.

    For inspiration check this plugin
    https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/131/touchpad-indicator/

    It is the very first plugin i get when install a new GNOME desktop, and i think is basic functionality. I think KDE mouse settings also has this option

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