Yesterday I got a new mouse. A Logitech G5. Being a nice mouse overall it has a small little flaw: clicking the mouse wheel is not that easy because you can click it in three ways. Down and from left and right.
As I frequently use the middle mouse button I was not happy (because it often misinterpreted a click for a wiggle-left). As a geek I thought: wiggling the mouse wheel to the left is even easier than clicking on it. I would no longer have to lift my finger off the left mouse button. The question was: How can I remap this 7th mouse button?
After some research I found it was very easy to remap the button.
First you have to correctly configure the mouse in your Xorg configuration file:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Logitech G5" Driver "evdev" Option "CorePointer" Option "Device" "/dev/input/by-id/usb-Logitech_USB_Gaming_Mouse-event-mouse" Option "ZAxisMapping" "invert" Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false" Option "Buttons" "9" Option "Resolution" "800" EndSection
(My thanks go to chuck)
From there it took a bit more research to learn that I can use xmodmap to easily remap the mouse buttons:
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 7 3 4 5 6 2 8 9"
Remaps button 7 into the poistion of button 2 ( mouse- wheel-click). For more information visit the very good tutorial by HP.
Now I just had to put the “pointer = 1 7 3 4 5 6 2 8 9” part into a file into my home directory (surprisingly called .Xmodmap) and let Fluxbox execute it at startup.
Now I just have to get used to other mice not worknig like that ;-)