#natural scroll

My laptop has a Synaptics touchpad and I recently switched to i3 window manager. The problem for me was the scrolling. I prefer natural scrolling and the resources that I found weren’t really helpful, since I figured, that I've libinput installed instead of synclient driver.

So, now that I've the fix for the issue, here is a generic approach to fix for yourself.

Figure out the devices you have: xinput

List down the props for a device: xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"

Set the props: xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled" 1

To make this default on startup add the above line to your i3wm config file: exec --no-startup-id xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled" 1

OS X Lion introduces "Natural Scroll", which is another way of saying two-finger scroll will work in the opposite direction that it did before. This is meant to make the experience more tablet-like, in that it's almost like you're pulling the screen in the direction you want it to scroll, rather than pushing towards the direction you want. Just look at the videos in the system preferences for Lion if it's confusing.

The problem, for many of us, is that it changes the direction of the mouse wheel as well. I like the natural scroll idea for the touchpad, but I want the mouse wheel to continue to scroll the page up when wheeled up, down when wheeled down. Disabling natural scroll for the mouse will disable it for the touchpad, and vice-versa. Bit of an oversight in my opinion.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zedtux/naturalscrolling sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install naturalscrolling

Note that at the time of writing the ‘Autostart at login’ feature is broken. I've fixed that by adding naturalscrolling to autorun list in Gnome.