I have been using KDE in Debian 5 Lenny since its release around Easter this
year. Mostly it is brilliant, my thanks to all the developers. But there has
been a persistent problem of unreliability of the 3 button mouse emulation,
that was not present in my old Woody system. This shows up worst in KEdit and
Konsole, when trying to paste in by simultaneously clicking both mouse buttons.
Often, and unpredictably, an unwanted right-click menu appears, instead of the
wanted paste. And even worse, one of the menu items is often unintentionally
activated, with nuisance effects.
To try to work around this problem, I decided to increase the time threshold
for the simultaneous 2 button click. Looking on x.org for guidance on how to
do this, I found that it can be done by adding a single line to
/etc/X11/xorg.conf. Specifically, as set up automatically, there is a section
in this file that reads:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
EndSection
I have now altered this section by adding an extra line, so that it now reads:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Emulate3Timeout" "10000"
EndSection
The 10000 is the threshold for the simultaneous 2 button click, in
milliseconds, so that the threshold is now 10 seconds. The default was 50
milliseconds. I experimented with various increased thresholds, and found that
it is least stressful with this large threshold. What happens now is that if I
click the right mouse button and release it, the right-click menu instantly
appears. But if I press the right mouse button and hold it, the right-click
menu does not appear until a ten second delay has passed. However, perhaps due
to a slight electrical glitch or failure of de-bouncing, the right-click menu
_sometimes_ still appears unwanted immediately, when I press and hold the right
mouse button, just as if I had released it. But because I am no longer under
any pressure to press the left mouse button immediately, I can now wait to see
that this does not happen, before clicking the left mouse button. Then the
wanted paste appears when I release the right mouse button. So the whole
process is more relaxed and calm, and less stressful.
It seems that the right-click menu now activates an item if you accidentally
release the right mouse button while the pointer is over that menu item, even
if you never touch the left mouse button, and this can still lead to nuisance
unwanted activation of menu items, if one is not careful. There is also a
tendency to release the right mouse button accidentally while clicking the left
mouse button, if one is not careful. But at least one can be more relaxed and
calm about it, now that one is not trying to click both mouse buttons exactly
simultaneously.
You have to reboot the computer for the new option to take effect.
Incidentally, the /etc/X11/xorg.conf set up by Debian does not show the
available options. However I found a listing of a similar file that did show
the available options, commented out, by searching for change Emulate3Timeout
on http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/. I learned that Emulate3Timeout
was the relevant option, by looking at the log file at /var/log/Xorg.0.log.
Best regards,
Chris Austin
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