Computer Mice and Trackpads

Scroll Wheel Speed Tweaks

The default scroll speed in most distros is just too slow. Most distros have nothing in the Settings for mouse scroll speed by default. But this can be easily changed with the imwheel package!

Installing imwheel

Install imwheel on your current distro. For example:

Ubuntu 18.04-20.04: sudo apt install imwheel

Arch Linux/Manjaro: sudo pacman -S imwheel

Next, you will need to configure imwheel.

Configuring imwheel

Open a terminal and type cd ~, then nano .imwheelrc.

In that file, you will want to paste (or type) the following:

# change chromium to your preferred browser. This is a regular expression, so in imwheel, any process that contains the word chromium in it. This does not include the "normal" Google Chrome for Linux (that you'll have to install separately, see the Wiki page "Installing Google Chrome" for detail how to do that.
# Both ^chromium$ and ^firefox$ work. They do need to be in quotes though. 
"^chromium$"
        None, Up, Button4, 3
        None, Down, Button5, 3

The 3 says how many lines you want to scroll at a time. I personally recommend 3, some people prefer 4.

Then press Ctrl+X, Y, then ENTER keys. This will save the changes to your file exit nano text editor.

The final step is to run it.

Running imwheel

To run imwheel, simply type imwheel in the terminal. That's it!

You can run it on startup simply by adding imwheel to your distro's autostarting applications. GNOME and KDE have dedicated sections in Settings or "System Settings" (KDE) for automatically starting applications.

(In KDE, it may not appear in the dropdown of applications that shows up, as KDE doesn't recognize imwheel as an "application" (because it does not install a .desktop file). Just type imwheel and click the "OK" button.)

Trackpad Sensitivity Tweaks

These are specifically for the Precision 5520 but may work on other laptops.

NOTE: these do not work with libinput, and have not for years (surprisingly this issue doesn't receive much attention). You'll need to find a way to install the xinput Synaptics package.

[To be found in my wiki backups]