One finger scrolling using the entire touch pad area for devices with a pointing stick
Summary
Add a new scrolling mode: one finger scrolling using the entire touch pad area solely for scrolling for all devices with a pointing stick.
Feature details
- Disable all pointer functionality of the touch pad (freeing a one finger movement for other uses)
- Map all one finger movements to a scroll event
This only makes sense for devices that have a secondary way of doing pointer movements, like all Thinkpads or other devices that have a pointing stick. One finger is used for the pointer movement via the pointing stick, a second finger - most likely the thumb - hovers over the touch pad, touching down to scroll.
A possible variant of this could be thumb scrolling, as this is the only finger that naturally hovers over the touch pad on Thinkpads while the primary finger is using the pointing stick.
Affected Hardware
All devices with both pointing stick and touch pad.
Implementation in Other Systems
I am not aware of this feature existing in any other systems, but I am aware of multiple work arounds that people have come up with, emulating this behaviour with the xf86-input-synaptics driver, never making it necessary to implement such a feature in the first place.
One variant uses the edge scrolling feature and just reconfigures the edge to map to the area of the entire touch pad, like described here.
The other variant sets both "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" and "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" to 0, making one finger to register as two.