Scroll by keeping a button pressed and rolling a trackball

[urlwolf]

Anyone has any experience with scrolling by keeping a button pressed and rolling a trackball?
Just bought a logitech marble, and it does that. Wondering about long-term effects. Doesn't look super ergonomic to me, but reviews on amazon are really good.

[davkol]

The TrackMan Marble sometimes missed the "hold" part and applied the other function of the small button instead. Otherwise, holding the middle button to scroll is essentially a standard with thinkpad trackpoints and works pretty well.

Either way, I prefer twisting the ball on my slimblade.

[jacobolus]

Yes, hold-a-button-and-point-normally-to-scroll is a godsend. It’s great with a regular mouse too.

Unfortunately I’ve only ever experienced it in my own little software experiments, because there’s no obvious way to splice it into all applications at the OS level. If you control the hardware/firmware on your mouse/keyboard/trackball then you should be able to make it work, but it might not be easy:

As far as I know (this was true last time I checked which was like 3–4 years ago) Windows/Linux don’t support pixel-precise scrolling, but only coarse scrolling (e.g. one line at a time). Coarse scrolling is ****ing annoying when you are using a device which otherwise should provide high precision.

I suspect that Apple’s trackpads / magic mouse / etc. implement their pixel-by-pixel scrolling via a custom extension to the USB HID protocol, as from what I can tell the standard HID protocol doesn’t have standard support for the feature, but I don’t really know exactly. Thus to actually get pixel-by-pixel scrolling working might take reverse engineering and reimplementing their protocol.

How is the Logitech marble working for you? Can it scroll by single pixels?

[SamirD]

Am I the only one that still uses page up/down and arrow up/down?  I've always found that to do the job.

[Zustiur]

You're not the only one. Keys > mouse

[SamirD]

You're not the only one. Keys > mouse

Yay!  I actually want to produce some t-shirts for this, but didn't think anyone would buy them, lol.

[Findecanor]

Unfortunately I’ve only ever experienced it in my own little software experiments, because there’s no obvious way to splice it into all applications at the OS level. If you control the hardware/firmware on your mouse/keyboard/trackball then you should be able to make it work, but it might not be easy:

It was ten years ago I last checked so I might remember incorrectly or things could have changed, but I think that you could rewrite the generic mouse driver on Mac to get button mouse-scrolling. It is part of the low-level Darwin framework, which is Open Source.

As a matter of fact, mouse-button scrolling was one of the reason why I wanted to hack Mac's mouse driver in the first place. However, I decided to instead sell the Mac and go back to Linux so I never finished it.
I had wanted to make it feel like middle-mouse-button scroll in Postscript viewer "Ghostview": instead of a direct translation of movement to scrolling, holding down the middle mouse button would extend a movement vector: the length of the vector would tell how fast the scrolling would be.
Some web browsers do something similar, but they toggle scrolling mode instead of doing it the right way: there should be scrolling only for as long as the button is held down.

Am I the only one that still uses page up/down and arrow up/down?  I've always found that to do the job.

That is what I always use. The scrollwheel has been removed from my mouse.

[SamirD]

So for my page up/down friends in this thread, does it annoy you when people use the scroll on the mouse?  (It bothers me!)

[urlwolf]

I mounted the marble trackball at the center of a split keyboard. The click is done with index left finger, in an angle that I'm sure was not what the makers intended. This is why I wonder if this is ergonomic at all.

[SamirD]

I mounted the marble trackball at the center of a split keyboard. The click is done with index left finger, in an angle that I'm sure was not what the makers intended. This is why I wonder if this is ergonomic at all.

If it's ergonomic to you, it's ergonomic enough.  Your hands will tell you if it's not. 

[cogito_ergo_sum]

I second the use of page up and down as a substitute for scrolling.  Another option is to write an Autohotkey script for multiple downs, so you can do e.g. a quarter or half pgdn - useful if you have a list of links or lines to move through, and the down key sometimes gets away from you if held down.

I'm fairly certain that programmable mice allow one of the keys or buttons to be programmed to pgup or pgdn. I'm considering something like this
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-G600-Gaming-Mouse-Black/dp/B0086UK7IQ/ref=pd_sim_147_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=07H5QEAWRVQ2MQQT99YM&dpID=418gvV8MoTL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR160%2C160_
for home use. The description says it has a "clickable scroll wheel", though I don't know what the click actually does. As far as I know, all such mice require special software which is included.

Also, the 3M ergonomic mouse (my current preferred device) allows one to hold down a button on the stalk and move the mouse up or down to scroll.

If you want to move the cursor with a button, you can activate MouseKeys on Windows.

[cogito_ergo_sum]

Actually, I think that Autohotkeys can be used to simulate a scroll with a mouse button. I can't test it right now, but a combination of MouseMove and then assigning the macro to a mouse button should work. Perhaps add some sleeps to keep it from going too fast.