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I am using the imwheel program to change the default scrolling speed on Firefox when using i3. Below is my configuration (where "Navigator" is the output of an xprop command, found here, when clicking on a Firefox Window). 

# Speed up Scrolling in Firefox
"^Navigator$"
        None      , Up, Up, 3
        None      , Down, Down, 3
        Control_L , Up,   Control_L|Button4
        Control_L , Down, Control_L|Button5
        Shift_L   ,   Up,   Shift_L|Button4
        Shift_L   ,   Down, Shift_L|Button5

I have found that on most websites, the desired behavior of "faster scrolling" is present, but on certain other websites, most prominently Youtube or Facebook Messenger, scrolling normally with my mouse wheel takes on different behavior. On Youtube, for example, when I click on a video, scrolling doesn't move the webpage up or down but instead changes the volume level. I need to click off the video with the middle button and then scroll to perform the expected scrolling behavior.

I know the issue is with my imwheel configuration because on running pkill imwheel, this issue goes away.

What is causing this issue? And what buttons on my mousewheel can I remap to avoid this behavior?

The man page for imwheel mentions that the "button spec" has numbers for different buttons on the mouse, but I'm not sure if the "Extra Buttons" are what I'm looking for.

I am running exec imwheel on my i3 config file. Running imwheel -b "4 5" so that only the scrolling buttons are affected similarly did not change anything about this issue.

Ricardo Iglesias
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  • I found out about the xev command and found that the states of my mouse are different when I do a regular scroll and when I press down on the scroll button and scroll. On Regular scroll, the "State" for Up and Down are: 0x10_00 and 0x08_00 respectively. On clicked scroll, 0x12_00 and 0x0a_00. I'm unsure how to use this information for imwheel. – Ricardo Iglesias Apr 26 '20 at 16:41
  • Another interesting behavior is that the "Mouse Click" acts as a "Paste" for whatever is currently on my clipboard. I don't think this is exactly the same problem, but it does add a layer of difficult in using imwheel. (EDIT: This is not caused by imwheel, but it does mean it's a button that's modifiable). – Ricardo Iglesias Apr 29 '20 at 18:42

1 Answers1

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I ran into this same exact issue: YouTube (Firefox) acting strange whenever I ran imwheel. My configuration looked very similar to yours - I stole it from this answer: https://askubuntu.com/a/304653/1269098

".*"
None,       Up,     Up,     3
None,       Down,   Down,   3

Just like you described, running pkill imwheel fixed the weird behavior.

Thankfully, I was able to find a fix via this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/n7dki4/smalls_tweaks_to_improve_ubuntu_all_working_on/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

I wouldn't recommend running the curl | bash command - it's bad practice - but have a look at the script and, once you've read it, run it: http://www.nicknorton.net/mousewheel.sh

My configuration now looks like this and everything works as expected:

".*"
None,      Up,   Button4, 3
None,      Down, Button5, 3
Control_L, Up,   Control_L|Button4
Control_L, Down, Control_L|Button5
Shift_L,   Up,   Shift_L|Button4
Shift_L,   Down, Shift_L|Button5
mackorone
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