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I have a really annoying bug. This is not a bug report but I will report what the bug does to me. Occasionally when I middle click, it fires through two or three middle click events. I say occasionally but it comes in clusters. The effect of this purely annoying:

  • A link opens X times in X new tabs
  • I paste something into a terminal X times
  • I middle click to start freescrolling and if (X % 2 == 0) it thinks I didn't want to scroll at all.

This bug has haunted me for a long time. Right back to 9.04. Since then I've changed the following:

  • New motherboard (same CPU)
  • New mouse (Logitech => Razer)
  • New graphics card (still Nvidia, still binary driver)
  • New install of Ubuntu (copy of profile - but issue happens in new guest profile too)

There was a suggestion in the bug (that has now been deleted for inactivity) that the Nvidia driver could be the cause.

But I'm not here to talk to you all about the bug because we don't do bug reports here. Given the problem just won't die for me I thought I'd ask the many smart minds here if I could work around it. I have one idea:

Can I put a minimum delay on click events in X/XInput/whatever-mice-use?

If I could put a 50ms barrier in there, I'm certain it wouldn't affect me but it would nuke the bug.

Obviously if you're familiar with how to fix the bug outright, I also want to hear from you!

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Oli
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  • If the bug wrongly was closed due to inactivity, set it back to New/Confirmed. – htorque Nov 03 '11 at 22:13
  • I hunted for it before posting this and can't find it. I'll have a look through my launchpad emails later and see if it still exists in any form. Edit: Nope. I should file another bug at some point but this question is really supposed to be about sidestepping the issue. – Oli Nov 03 '11 at 22:20
  • when you post the new bug, I suggest you mention that this hasn't been fixed since 9.04! – Alvar May 23 '12 at 16:04
  • For a bug on Launchpad to simply cease to exist is extremely unusual. Bugs are not deleted after they are considered fixed (nor after being marked Invalid or Won't Fix). Are you the original reporter of the missing bug? Can you tell us your Launchpad username? – Eliah Kagan May 23 '12 at 16:05
  • more ways to fix this are listed at http://askubuntu.com/questions/321816/mouse-sometimes-doubleclicks-when-i-click-once – Matija Nalis May 31 '15 at 22:12

2 Answers2

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Turns out this problem was caused by a hardware fault in both mice. I fixed it by opening up my mouse and hosing down both the wheel and all the button swictes with compressed contact cleaner.

Unfortunately this dissolved the grease on the mousewheel rigging so I had to apply fresh silicone grease to these parts.

All in all, an £8 spend to bring a £100 mouse back to life seems like a fair deal. Yes, I paid too much for a mouse but it looks pretty.

enter image description here

Oli
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    Sometimes cleaning the mouse won't help, if the circutry is damaged. So a software click limiter would still be useful for some people. – Victor Sergienko Apr 20 '15 at 13:20
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When I looked up mouse debouncing an Ubuntu forum article mentioned https://launchpad.net/btnx/ and btnx-config. It sounds like a general tool, but perhaps it would be helpful.

John S Gruber
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  • I used to use btnx (for mapping an old Logitech mouse's buttons) but it's been a thoroughly dead project for a long time now, even the creators domain is dead now. It was dropped after an Xinput update (IIRC - this was a long time ago) – Oli Jun 14 '12 at 12:13
  • Not entirely dead, as I see some alive forks on github. – Victor Sergienko Apr 20 '15 at 13:20