Bind special actions to extra mouse buttons.

Brainstorm
1

So the KDE extra mouse button bindings are very nice to have instead of needing to rely on an external tool, the restriction for technical stability that mouse buttons can’t be bound to other mouse buttons is mildly annoying, but I think I’ve thought up a workaround that would keep some of the integrity of this restriction while doing away with most of the frustrations this causes.

There are certain special functions like the touchpad style scrolling, primary paste, tab back/forward and the like which are optional additions to existing mouse buttons like the middle mouse button that it would be incredibly convenient to be able to bind piecemeal to extra buttons instead of heaping very large feature sets onto existing buttons that way users with extra buttons could use these buttons to reduce the ambiguity of what happens when they press a button.

There are other potentially useful functions that could be made available as well, function my mouses driver offered on non-linux os’s was to have a button which temporarily reduced mouse sensitivity by some amount when held for example, or a mouse button to put the mouse in “gesture mode” for invoking a number of user set actions with mouse wiggles.

Tools like input remapper do exist to bypass KDE’s mouse button binding restrictions, but these tools can have issues due to how difficult their job is to support all the various desktop environments, so I’d definitely like stable support for something built into the system menus, and that we might be able to achieve better functionality without overriding the restrictions we’ve put in place for (What I understand) is driver stability.

2 Likes
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I’d love this on KDE Plasma too.

It would also be nice to be able to use a keyboard hot key for it as an alternative for a mouse button. (Easier sometimes to make fine mouse movements if you don’t have to hold a button down.)

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This is why I mentioned this in response to wanting to be able to put extra functions on these extra buttons when using the kde plasma button mapper. Functionality like this could considerably improve the desktops quality of life.

Application specific mouse button profiles is the only other thing I’d say is missing from said menu, as since a persons needs often differ greatly between an art program, spreadsheets, web browsing, or even across different types of games.

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From the early days of using Firefox and Opera browsers, I was most impressed (on X11) with easystroke, and later on in KDE with ‘Mouse Gestures’.

Later on a project ‘Mouse Actions’ was started, and we’re still waiting to see development…

Mouse Gestures are an incredible way to drive a desktop, and I could bind any action not only to keyboard shortcuts, but have them mirrored in a gesture… but it’s one of the limitations that came with Wayland which might take a long time (if ever) to come to fruition.