Add Touchpad Scroll Sensitivity Adjustment Feature

This is very much needed, since very long actually

The touchpad scrolling issue is so fundamental that it makes me sometimes want to switch to KDE Plasma

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Do you think you have enough know-how to maybe make a PR for it? @felipeborges did mention that it was a feature under his radar, it might be a welcome addition :stuck_out_tongue:

Not sure if the “new two finger side swipe gesture” is a viable option.

AFAIK, gesture support is from libinput, which leaves things out of GNOME’s hands.
I wonder if swipes can be accounted for by exponential acceleration, e.g. baseline gesture speed is e.g. 0.2 (configurable by a slider as you proposed) and increases the longer/further the event goes.
If my logic is correct, that would reach the original speed shortly, and the swipe would trigger as usual without any modification to anything other than clutter.

Best regards,

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I’d like to see this one added and I may start working on patches for Mutter and Gnome Settings myself as this one really grinds my gears.

In the interim, I’ve published an AUR package for anyone running Arch-based distributions that includes a hack to slow down the default touchpad scrolling.

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Hey, this is really a big issue, I barely move my fingers on the touchpad and it scrolls through the whole page.

That seems like a sensible solution

In clutter_event_get_scroll_delta , I changed event->scroll.delta_x to event->scroll.delta_x * 0.2 , and identically for _y and rebuilt mutter from source. The only effect from this which I experienced was slowing down the touchpad scrolling. Mouse scrolling was unaffected, so was pointer move speed - hence my guess that this function handles the touchpad scrolling only.

It looks as though this fix / hack no longer works :frowning:

Reverting back to 46.rc before some changes and the above fix works

It works in 46.3 and is the patch I did in the AUR package and is working on my system. I’ll update today and see if some kind of change around it that I haven’t picked up yet has broken it.

@bcrescimanno I started working on a patch to add support for a new setting “touchpad-scroll-speed” inside gsettings-desktop-schemas and gnome-control-center 47.

I haven’t tried the mutter patches yet.

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@Shyne Nice! I just got back from vacation; so, I haven’t had a chance to look into the settings yet. My basic thought is to implement the setting UI such that it stores a value in dconf and use that instead of a magic number in the mutter code itself. It probably makes sense to have the scale go from something like 0.01 to 1.5 to allow for making it even faster (though, I have no idea why anyone would want that).

@bcrescimanno I have successfully implemented the setting in dconf (/desktop/org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/scroll-speed) and in the “settings” app, i added a slider right under the cursor speed for the “scroll speed” in the touchpad section.

I’m very new to GNOME though (installed for about 3days now), so i don’t really know what headers to include in the mutter file to fetch settings from dconf, i’d love your help on this.

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I’m not a Gnome developer myself; so, I’m not sure how much help I can be.

However, here’s the backend for mutter that appears responsible for reading from GSettings. Specifically, the implementation of updating the mouse speed is probably relevant here.

@bcrescimanno It looks like there has been a pending PR for over 3 years implementing the feature in mutter, and it has been discussed 2days ago (@jadahl do you have more info about this ?)

The implementation looks solid and has conveniently the same setting name as the one i created, i only have to make another one for the mouse scroll speed.

edit: it looks like there is also a PR for adding the settings in the gnome settings

and in the schemas:

Might have just wasted my time, lesson learned: check the 3yr old PRs ^^’

Eh, it’s a good learning experience, anyway! Besides, the 3 year old code in those MRs isn’t likely to be particularly usable today without some serious modification. It can give you some good ideas about how to implement since no one called out any specific concerns other than it needing to clear the CI pipeline.

Hello there - I’m new to this forum, new to Gnome, and new to linux overall. Just wanted to add a comment here as I would also very much like a scroll speed setting feature.

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Adding a reply just to keep this alive but highly doubt this is being worked on.

Might be a bit off-topic but the COSMIC alpha has implementation of both touchpad scroll speed adjustment and touchpad accelaration control.

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I don’t know how the GNOME project organises its priorities, but this should definitely be made a high priority.

It’s so frustrating that’s preventing people using GNOME. It’s also just embarrassing that a desktop environment still has this issue after 40 releases.

The GNOME project does not work like a company: if people want to make something happen, they can work on it and contribute it to the various projects involved.

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This is just embarrassing when someone says “Linux doesn’t even have a proper way of settings scroll speed” and you don’t know what to tell because they’re right!

I’m a PHP developer and I don’t know sh*t about these stuff. Learning them was so much harder and much more time consuming than I’ve ever thought otherwise I was working on this already…