Remapping mouse buttons

permanently
To remap mouse buttons permanently, you can use the xinput setbuttonmap command. Every mouse
button click issues a button click with a specific id to X11. X11 recognizes the following
buttons:

ID Button

1 Left click

2 Middle click

3 Right click

4 Wheel up

5 Wheel down

6 Wheel left

7 Wheel right

8 Thumb1

9 Thumb2

10 ExtBt7

11 ExtBt8

You can use the following command to remap the buttons:

xinput setbuttonmap <deviceid> <button1> <button2> <button3> <buttonN>

The <deviceid> is shown in the xinput list output - you can use the name as a string or the id
number. You can query the actual button state using xinput querystate <deviceid> .

So the default configuration ( xinput setbuttonmap <deviceid> 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ) would give you

the normal behavior. But if you prefer e.g. having the thumb buttons for WheelLeft and
WheelRight, you would run this command:

# input id: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
xinput setbuttonmap <deviceid> 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7

This would map buttons 86 and 97 and vice versa.

To automatically set your preferred mapping on bootup, you can add the line to System
Preferences Startup Applications (formerly Sessions).
per application (Wheel/Thumb only)
To remap wheel/thumbmouse buttons per application, you can use imwheel from the samenamed
package. After installing the package, copy the default configuration to your homedir:

cp /etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc ~/.imwheelrc

And then enable the automatic starting upon start of X11 by editing /etc/X11/imwheel/startup.conf
and changing the IMWHEEL_START value to 1 .

Now you can modify your .imwheelrc to fit your needs. The format is

"window regexp"
Modifier, Mousebutton, Keypresses/Mousebutton

So for example to use the WheelLeft and WheelRight buttons to switch tabs in Firefox, you could
use the following definition:

"^Firefoxbin$"
# Flip between browser tabs
None, Left, Control_L|Page_Up
None, Right, Control_L|Page_Down

This would map WheelLeft to Ctrl - PgUp and WheelRight to Ctrl - PgDn .

A Modifier of None means, this only works if no modifier ( Shift_L , Shift_R , Control_L ,
Control_R , Alt_L , Alt_R ) is pressed while clicking. If you leave this empty, the mapping works
regardless of which modifier is held down.

Use this to go to previous/next track in Rhythmbox using the WheelLeft and WheelRight clicks:

"^Rhythmbox$"
None, Left, Alt_L|Left
None, Right, Alt_L|Right

(In this case, Rhythmbox defines the window resource name since Rhythmbox itself puts the
currently playing song in the title bar. You could also match against rhythmbox which is the
window class name. Since imwheel c wasnt able to show them to me, I just guessed.)

Looks like imwheel causes some problems when scrolling in Opera:

The webpage doesnt get redrawn so that you have blank or garbled
areas when scrolling. Also you have to click on an area to scroll
it. (i.e. if you have a webpage with a textarea, the scrollwheel
will scroll the textarea even if the pointer is outside of it until
you click the area outside the textarea).

To get back the original behavior, comment out the lines for Opera
in your .imwheelrc or add an @Exclude rule.