NOTE: This post is written with full comprehension of it's ultimate triviality and in no way seeks to belittle those battling real personal problems. If you feel you have a problem that needs to be remedied please seek help.
I’ve heard the first step to fixing a personal problem is admitting you have one. That’s a bit difficult when you are blissfully unaware a particular problem even exists. Fortunately, Linux was kind enough to fill me in. You see, I am hopelessly dependent on the mouse wheel. I’m unaware when this first occurred but I suspect, like most things, I gradually succumbed to it’s wiles.
According to Wikipedia, the mouse wheel was a joint Japan/Switzerland invention in 1985. It became popular starting in 1996 via the Microsoft Intellimouse coupled with support in Microsoft Office 97. It became ubiquitous with the widespread popularity of the web. It is hard to imagine scrolling through web pages without it. The tedium of constantly finding the scrollbar to read several more lines of text is nearly unthinkable. I’m so pathetic that even the amount of lines scrolled by the wheel can affect me.
I created a virtual machine with the latest version of Elementary OS, a very polished flavor of Linux that users of MacOS would find very familiar. I immediately noticed the mouse wheel “problem” but found no setting to increase the amount of lines to scroll. I told myself I’d get used to it and soldiered on. That lasted about a day. I soon found myself feverishly searching the internet for a solution.
Relief was found via a tiny console application called imwheel. I want to give a shout-out to Andrew at WebUpd8, a Ubuntu/Linux blog. His article will give you detailed instructions on what to do and I believe they will work on most Linux distributions.
My world made right, I am happily exploring what Linux has to offer after a long absence. Now then, about those keyboard media buttons…
