mouseemu (8)

mouseemu [options]

Mouseemu is a daemon to emulate mouse buttons on trackpads with only one button. It lets you:

  - emulate middle and right click

  - emulate mouse wheel

  - block trackpad while typing

It was initially developed for Apple PowerBooks and iBooks, but it may be useful on other architectures as well.

This program only works when booting a 2.6 kernel because it uses the new uinput interface to emulate the mouse.

-middle B2_MOD B2_KEY

Modifier and key for the middle (second) mouse button. Defaults to F10 and no modifier on PowerPC and Intel Macs, and to none on all other architectures.

-right B3_MOD B3_KEY

Modifier and key for the right (third) mouse button. Defaults to F11 and no modifier on PowerPC and Intel Macs, and to none on all other architectures.

-scroll SCROLL_MOD

Modifier for the scrolling function. Defaults to Alt.

-typing-block DELAY

Time in milliseconds for which the trackpad will be blocked while typing on the keyboard. Defaults to 300ms.

-device UINPUT

Device node for the uinput device. Defaults to /dev/uinput. If this device is not read and writeable the following devices are also tried: /dev/uinput, /dev/input/uinput and /dev/misc/uinput.

-nofork

don't run in the background

-autorescan

Automatically scan every 5s for new devices. This is normally not need, as udev should inform mouseemu about new devices.

-debug

print debugging messages about device scans

-help

show usage message

The key codes for the buttons and modifiers are key scancodes. They can be found in include/linux/input.h in the kernel headers or by using `showkey` in a console. The keycodes must be given as decimal values (`showkey` displays hex values!).

Mouseemu does normally not automatically scan for new devices. An udev rule is used to trigger a rescan when new devices are connected. You can also trigger a rescan manually by sending a HUP signal to the mouseemu process.

To have the same behaviour as in MacOS X (CTRL-click for right mouse button and no emulation for the middle button):

mouseemu -middle 0 0 -right 29 272

The code for the (left) mouse button is 272 (0x110 in hex). The code for CTRL is 29.

Trigger a rescan for newly attached devices:

kill -HUP `cat /var/run/mouseemu.pid`

Mouseemu was written by Colin Leroy <[email protected]>. This manpage was originally written by Gaudenz Steinlin <[email protected]> for the Debian Project, but may be used by others under the terms of the GNU General Public License.