Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!bu-cs!madd From: madd@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Jim Frost) Newsgroups: comp.unix.i386 Subject: Re: Running X11 with a 2 button PS/2 mouse Message-ID: <39139@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Date: 28 Sep 89 23:00:54 GMT References: <309@bulus3.BMA.COM> Reply-To: madd@bucsd.bu.edu (Jim Frost) Followup-To: comp.unix.i386 Organization: Software Tool & Die Lines: 41 In article <309@bulus3.BMA.COM> haugen@bulus3.BMA.COM (John M. Haugen) writes: |Is there any way to map the third button to another key or a combination of |the other two mouse buttons? Not under ISC 386/ix. One thing that you can do is to use xmodmap to toggle button 2 and button 3 bindings from the window manager: xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 3" # map button 2 to button 3 xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2" # map button 2 to itself This can be done manually, too, but I find that having it on my twm applications menu works pretty well. I spoke to the ISC person who did much of the mouse handling (sorry, your name is at work an I'm not) and he said he'd experimented with chording (multiple simultaneous buttons producing unavailable buttons), but that this causes problems with some X applications. He's right, of course, not to mention all the timing problems that chording causes. Not having the third button causes more problems, though :-). I think of this as an X deficiency; there really should be some way to xmodmap any key/pointer combination to any other, allowing the user to configure his/her system to allow rctrl-button-2 to mean button 3, for instance. Given the general response of the MIT people to my complaints, don't look for this anytime soon. A lot of people complain that we X applications writers should "do the right thing" and use the database functions that X gives. They're right, of course, but speaking as an applications writer let me tell you that X isn't the easiest thing to write a real application in in the first place, much less to do right. It should not really be up to the application writer to handle this mapping anyway, but this kind of gets back to the same arguments I have with the MS-DOS technique of having each application handle globbing. Good luck, jim frost software tool & die madd@std.com