TrackPoint Scrolling

In Ubuntu, it’s quite easy to set “natural” scrolling on the touchpad. We can do this by checking a box in Mouse & Touchpad settings. However, for ThinkPad users, this doesn’t change the scrolling settings on the TrackPoint. To get the TrackPoint settings to match the natural scrolling on the touchpad, we make use of xinput.

Find the right settings

First, we find the property we need to modify. We do this by doing:

xinput list-props "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"

Edit (Aug 5, 2018): After an update, I noticed the name of this property has changed to "TPPS/2 Elan TrackPoint". The instructions remain the same, but replace "IBM" with "Elan".

In the output, there should be an entry for wheel-emulation:

  ...
  Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (422):       6, 7, 4, 5
  ...

Set the proper values

To get natural scrolling on the TrackPoint, we make a small change to the integer values:

xinput set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes" 7, 6, 5, 4

Now, the TrackPoint should have natural scrolling!

Make the change permanent

When we log out, our wheel-emulation settings get reverted back to default. If we want natural scrolling to be set upon log-in, we append our command to ~/.profile:

echo 'xinput set-prop "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" "Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes" 7, 6, 5, 4' >>~/.profile

Now, our changes are permanent!

For more ways to configure the TrackPoint, visit this ThinkWiki page.

Questions? Comments? Corrections? Leave me a comment. Cheers!