The Pointer Page

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

The Pointer Page

Three sections: Mouse Acceleration, Mouse Mapping and Click Speed. On the canonical face these are the whole panel, stacked, with no tabs.

Each section is a bold heading over its controls. There are no boxes around them; grouping is heading and whitespace, as on the original.

Mouse Acceleration:

A row of five diamonds, captioned Slow at the left end and Fast at the right. Click one to pick a preset. Each preset sets both the acceleration and the threshold together.

Under the presets is "Finer Control". On the canonical face this is a disclosure arrow: click it to reveal two sliders. On the extended face the sliders are always shown.

Acceleration   -15 to 25
Threshold      1 to 10 pixels

Acceleration is a multiplier. A positive value speeds the pointer up by that factor once it is moving faster than the threshold. A NEGATIVE value slows it down, by one over that number, so -4 is quarter speed. Zero means no change. The extended face shows the current value beside the slider as "7 x" or "1/4 x".

Threshold is how far the pointer must travel in one motion before acceleration applies at all. A low threshold accelerates almost everything; a high one leaves small careful movements alone.

The factory settings are acceleration 2 and threshold 4.

Mouse Mapping:

Two choices, "Right handed" and "Left handed". Left handed swaps the first and third buttons; the middle button is untouched, and so is every button beyond the third, including the wheel.

The factory setting is right handed.

Under them is a test area:

Test:  [ Click Here! ]

Click the button twice in quick succession. The label beside it reads "Double Click" if the two clicks were close enough together to count as one, and "Single Click" if they were not. This is measured against the current Click Speed setting, so it is a genuine test of what you just chose.

The test area is on both faces.

Click Speed:

Three diamonds, captioned Slow and Fast, and a "Finer Control" slider.

Slow      600 ms
medium    200 ms, the factory setting
Fast       90 ms

The slider is labelled "Double-click" and covers 175 to 250 ms.

The slider and the presets do not span the same range. The presets reach 90 and 600 ms; the slider only trims a narrow band around the 200 ms default. After clicking Slow the slider parks at its top end while the real setting is still 600 ms. Trust the preset, not the slider position.

How the Double-Click Time Reaches Applications

There is no display-wide double-click setting in X. Blueprint merges the value into the root resource database instead.

That means applications already running keep whatever they started with. Only programs launched after you press Apply see the new value.

Next

• The Trail Page
• The Cursor Page