remedy for a no scroll wheel trackball?

Question

I am thinking to buy an trackball and my option is Logitech trackman marble. But then I found that there is no scroll wheel. How do you tackle with that? Do I definitely want to buy a trackball with scroll wheel? I scroll a lot using facebook.

I don't want to click with my index and middle fingers, so some trackball mice will not work for me, like the Trackman Wheel.

Answer 1

Assuming you don't want to do a lot of hackery... or even if you do, just get a VERY small mouse with a scrollwheel. Quite often, pressing the middle mouse button and dragging acts as scrolling as well.

Alternately, you might want to look at this

Answer 2

Depending on your OS, you may be able to configure one of the buttons to enable scrolling via moving the pointer when held. E.g. the following script enables this on button 10 of my mouse (the "top middle" button of the Logitech MX310):

#!/bin/sh
xinput set-prop "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" 290 10
xinput set-prop "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" 286 1
xinput set-prop "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" 287 6 7 4 5

Answer 3

I have the same trackball and the solution is very elegant: when you click on a chosen button, the ball itself become a scrolling wheel. I've chosen the big right button that I press with the little finger.

This is very convenient and it takes only a few day to get used.

You will quickly consider that any scrollwheel (on a mouse or a trackball) is something unusable. Trust me, it worth it ;-)

Advantages:

• 2D scrolling instead of 1D
• quicker and more precise scrolling than a wheel
• more comfortable for long scroll (thanks to the ball's inertia). Perfect for your facebook example.

I cannot live without it anymore.

Configuring that under any Linux OS is not hard. It only requires you to create a /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (see my config here: Configure a trackball under Linux without editing Xorg.conf )

More details can be found here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Logitech_Marblemouse_USB

On Windows, I've no experience but I think a configuration tool is delivered with the trackball.