As I am on Debian 13 with Plasma 6.3.6 I don’t know if anything has changed in newer versions. But I have not read it anywhere. I was a heavy user of autoscrolling on Windows for years and do so on the browser in Linux, too. But everywhere else I just miss this feature. Not because there is no functionality, but the behavior is just so uncomfortable to use. Holding the middle mouse down and move and move and move the mouse. The benefit of the windows solution is to hold down the button, move the mouse only a little bit and keep the page scrolling with the speed that is represented by the moved distance. Moving higher distances lead to scrolling faster.
The benefits are: less mouse movement required to scroll large amount of distances (100 pages PDFs no issue etc) and moving in a constant speed. Especially the last thing is helpful to keep text readable while scrolling. Another benefit is that it also works in horizontal way, great for endless boards. In additional it is also more accessible than moving the mouse all the time for scrolling.
Is there any work going on in this direction or is this still something where discussion is required? I usually don’t need a copy of Windows behavior, KDE does a lot of things just better. But if I have to call a Windows feature perfect, it is this. On Linux I just disabled autoscrolling and autopasting. I rather would rebind the autopasting on a keyboard shortcut than using mouse button 3.
That’s not what this feature is for. It’s not meant as autoscrolling; it’s for devices like pointing sticks/trackpoints and (some) trackballs that do not have a mouse wheel, to emulate such a wheel. Plasma just allows you to turn it on with other devices as well (libinput enables it automatically on trackpoints, and possibly on trackballs - I don’t have one, so I don’t have experience with this). Because it’s a replacement for a scroll wheel, it’s main purpose is to scroll small distances (though scrolling long distances tends to work well on trackpoints as well - it’s just a good method for such device types).
We added a contextual help button in 6.4 to explain this directly in the UI.
For Windows-like autoscrolling, I think it’s just that no one is interested in doing the work to implement it. There’s an open feature request on bugs.kde.org that you can subscribe to for updates.
I took a look at using this setting on this Web Page – it works as documented but –
I have a Mouse with additional buttons which I have mapped to Page Up/Down { did you notice the “Configure Extra Buttons … ” Top Right on the Settings Window? } and
I prefer the additional Buttons to scroll Up/Down ove minimal Mouse Movements …
