I am sharing a computer with my wife. Since I am left handed I always have to swap the mouse buttons for left handed usage. I'm running Kubuntu 6.06 LTS which comes with the KDE desktop environment. It's relatively easy, but not very convenient to swap mouse buttons in KDE. Click on the K-button in the lower left corner of your screen, then click on "System Settings" and then under "Hardware" you can choose "Mouse". In the General tab you'll find two radio buttons, "Right handed" and "Left handed". Here you can change your default settings according to your needs. Since I am the only leftie in my family, I don't want to make the changes permanent.
Remember this is Linux. So we have more then just one way to accomplish a certain goal. There's the mighty command line of course, which I like very much. Open a Terminal or a 'Konsole' and type 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5"'. This swaps mouse buttons 1 and 3 and is only a temporary setting, that means when you log off, the changes will be lost. You can also change it back to your defaults by typing 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5"'.
My wife wasn't very happy with that. She asked me, to assign a hotkey for quickly changing mouse settings. Yes, a hotkey would probably be the most convenient way to change the mouse settings quickly. But how to achieve this goal? Assigning a hotkey to a script would have been nice. But I didn't now how to do that. But wait, in KDE there's the 'Menu Editor' which probably can be used to do the trick. To open it you'll have to right click the K-button in the lower left corner of your screen. Choose 'Menu Editor', go to 'Settings', right click on it and choose 'New Item'. I named it 'Mouse (left handed)' and typed the following command into the command field 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5 6 7 8 9"'. Then I assigned a hotkey by clicking on the 'Current Shortcut key' field and set my primary shortcut key to 'Ctrl+Win+L'. To change it back to it's defaults I assigned a second hotkey the same way. I named it 'Mouse (right handed) and typed the command 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"' and set my hotkey to 'Ctrl+Win+R. Then you'll have to save your new configuration settings and you're done. From now on you just have to press the Control Key the Windows Key and the letter L or R at the same time.
I hope this may help some left handed people swap mouse buttons very quickly. If someone knows a better method to do this, please tell me. Maybe a hotkey feature to change mouse settings will be implemented in a future version of KDE?
Cheers,
Crocodile Dundee
Remember this is Linux. So we have more then just one way to accomplish a certain goal. There's the mighty command line of course, which I like very much. Open a Terminal or a 'Konsole' and type 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5"'. This swaps mouse buttons 1 and 3 and is only a temporary setting, that means when you log off, the changes will be lost. You can also change it back to your defaults by typing 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5"'.
My wife wasn't very happy with that. She asked me, to assign a hotkey for quickly changing mouse settings. Yes, a hotkey would probably be the most convenient way to change the mouse settings quickly. But how to achieve this goal? Assigning a hotkey to a script would have been nice. But I didn't now how to do that. But wait, in KDE there's the 'Menu Editor' which probably can be used to do the trick. To open it you'll have to right click the K-button in the lower left corner of your screen. Choose 'Menu Editor', go to 'Settings', right click on it and choose 'New Item'. I named it 'Mouse (left handed)' and typed the following command into the command field 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5 6 7 8 9"'. Then I assigned a hotkey by clicking on the 'Current Shortcut key' field and set my primary shortcut key to 'Ctrl+Win+L'. To change it back to it's defaults I assigned a second hotkey the same way. I named it 'Mouse (right handed) and typed the command 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"' and set my hotkey to 'Ctrl+Win+R. Then you'll have to save your new configuration settings and you're done. From now on you just have to press the Control Key the Windows Key and the letter L or R at the same time.
I hope this may help some left handed people swap mouse buttons very quickly. If someone knows a better method to do this, please tell me. Maybe a hotkey feature to change mouse settings will be implemented in a future version of KDE?
Cheers,
Crocodile Dundee