Overview of Mouse Settings

Documentation / Contents - Mouse Settings

• Overview of Mouse Settings
  • The Window
  • The Buttons
  • When Changes Take Effect
  • The Trail and Cursor Daemon
• The Pointer Page
  • Mouse Acceleration
  • Mouse Mapping
  • Click Speed
  • How the Double-Click Time Reaches Applications
• The Trail Page
  • Show mouse trail
  • Trail style
  • Trail length
  • Options for Smoke/Dust FX
    • Smolder
    • Effect spheres
    • Stray pixels
    • Effect type
• The Cursor Page
  • Style
  • Cursor size
  • What This Does and Does Not Cover
• Keys, Files, and the Command Line
  • Keys
  • Command Line
  • The Configuration File
  • Environment Variables
• What Is Not Here
  • Belongs to Another Panel
  • Not Built
  • Known Rough Edges
  • Related Books

Other cards

• Copyright Information

Mouse Settings

Mouse Settings controls how the pointer moves, which hand the buttons suit, how fast a double click has to be, and what the pointer looks like. The program is cymouse. Its window is titled "Mouse Settings".

The Window

A header with a mouse picture and the title, a body, and a row of buttons along the bottom right.

The body depends on which face you asked for.

cymouse               three tabbed pages: Pointer, Trail, Cursor
cymouse --canonical   the SGI face: three stacked sections, no tabs

The tabs are drawn along the BOTTOM of the tabbed area.

The extended face is the default. It carries everything the SGI panel had, plus the pointer trail and the cursor styles, which are Blueprint additions aimed at making the pointer easier to find and follow.

The Buttons

canonical   Close   Reset ...   Help
extended    Close   Apply   Reset ...   Help

They sit clustered at the right with the left of the row empty, as the SGI Mouse, Keyboard and Screen Saver panels did.

• Close quits at once.
• Apply saves your settings and pushes them to the display.
• Reset ... goes straight to the factory settings.
• Help is not built yet.

Reset ... carries three dots but opens no dialog. It performs the factory reset the moment you click it. There is no "previous settings" branch and no confirmation.

The default button is Close on the canonical face and Apply on the extended one. Return activates it; Escape quits.

When Changes Take Effect

This differs by page, and it is worth knowing.

• Pointer page: every control takes effect on the display IMMEDIATELY, as the SGI panel did. They are only WRITTEN to your settings file when you press Apply.
• Trail and Cursor pages: every control saves and applies immediately. You do not need Apply for those.

So if you adjust acceleration and close without pressing Apply, the change holds for this session and is gone at the next login.

In This Book

• The Pointer Page
• The Trail Page
• The Cursor Page
• Keys, Files, and the Command Line
• What Is Not Here

The Trail and Cursor Daemon

The pointer trail and the large cursors are drawn by a companion program, cymoused. Mouse Settings starts it if it is not already running, and tells it to reload when you change something. If it cannot be found, the trail and the cursor styles simply do nothing and a note is logged; nothing else breaks.