Kensington Slimblade button mapping on Linux
Intro.
There are four buttons on the Kensington Slimblade trackball mouse. I wanted to use the left-top button as Backward
button and the right-top one as Forward
.
There would be some other solutions for mouse button mapping, but I used evdev
which operates on a X11
layer.
Solution
Add following lines to the file: /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf
.
# Kensington Slimblade Settings
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Kensington Slimblade Trackball"
MatchProduct "Kensington Slimblade Trackball"
MatchIsPointer "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 8 3 4 5 6 7 9"
EndSection
The key line is Option "ButtonMapping" "1 8 3 4 5 6 7 9 2"
. The final string indecates that it will map the button 1
to 1
, 2
to 8
, 3
to 3
, and so on. (The position number to the described number).
Use xev
tool to figure out the number of each button on your mouse.
In my case, I was helped with the other mouse to get the number of a Backward
button and a Forward
button. Those were 8
and 9
respectively.
Finally, I could map the left-top button(2) to Backward
button(8) and the right-top button(8) to Forward
button(9).