I occasionally experience strange, inconsistent behavior of the TrackPoint on my Lenovo w530. Sometimes, middle button scroll was not working at all, other times it kind of worked, however, after having scrolled and released the middle button, the clipboard's content was pasted into the current caret position. Also, scrolling pdf documents in evince with the TrackPoint simply resulting into up and down shaking and vibrating pages. I also noticed that in this cases, the cursor moved during middle button scroll which was very weird.
Locating the root cause
The symptoms above were not persistent across reboot - occasionally they were present. Further, restarting the X server typically improved the situation. After a bit of experimenting it turned out, that the strange behaviour occurs more frequently when running of a fast SSD, however, even with a rotating disk the symptoms appeared from time to time.
After a bit of googling I used the command xinput to enumerate X input devices and view their settings. I confirmed that wheel emulation was enabled, and configured for button 2. With xev I also confirmed that the middle TrackPoint button indeed fired button 2 events.
$ xinput --list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ <default pointer> id=6 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Integrated Camera id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ ThinkPad Extra Buttons id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
∼ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint id=15 [floating slave]
$ xinput --list-props "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" | grep "Wheel Emulation"
Evdev Wheel Emulation (425): 1
Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (426): 6, 7, 4, 5
Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (427): 10
Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (428): 200
Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (429): 2
$ xev
First I thought I should just disable the paste action on middle button click, by remapping the buttons. The middle button click actions can be completely disabled by the following command:
$ # disable normal middle button action (like paste)
$ xinput set-button-map "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" 1 0 3 4 5 6 7
This command eliminated the annoying text-pasting behavior whenever the middle button was released, but it did not solve the occasional inability to use middle button close, neither the shaking/vibrating pages in evince, so I continued investigating the issue...
I drew the conclusion that the error is caused by race conditions on around X server start, resulting an improper start up sequence of input device initialization. The W530 has 8 logical CPU cores, and my thinkpad is also equipped with a fast SSD - I already encountered similar issues in other areas which I recorded in previous posts.
My theory
I revisited the symptoms and tried to find a plausible explanation for the behavior. It seemed like 2 xinput devices were concurrently handling the TrackPoint, to a degree that varied across X restarts.
- Ability to move the cursor, but inability to use middle mouse scroll - in cases the 'other' devices actively handling the TrackPoint.
- Button click events when finishing middle wheel scroll - in case both X input devices are actively interpreting raw button press and release events.
- Moving cursor during middle button scroll - when both X input devices are interpreting pointer motion with the middle button pressed.
- Shaking pdf pages - I believe evince has some software level 'page dragging' capability built in, where the drag directions are the opposite of the scroll direction, resulting the strange vibrating effect. To clarify this assumption, let us imagine what happened if both X input devices were indeed actively handling the raw TrackPoint events: the pointer is moving upwards while the middle button is in a pressed state.
- The TrackPoint X input device, as wheel emulation is enabled, sends wheel events scrolling the page up.
- The other X input device, without wheel emulation, simply forwards the cursor movements and the pressed state of the middle button to the application, which activated page dragging. Dragging the current page upwards is equivalent to scrolling down.
According to an old email thread the X server automatically ads the input device <default pointer> if there are no configured pointing devices, and it is well possible that in my case TrackPoint initialization is done after, or in parallel to the X server checking for configured devices.
Steps to fix it
Looking at the output of xinput --list again, as shown above, made me wonder what a floating slave could mean - according to the GDK3 reference manual this indicates that the device is not attached to any virtual device (master). In the case when middle button scroll was not working at all, I could simply enable the TrackPoint device from the command line, which restored my ability to use middle button scroll but also reproduced the phenomenon of pasting-when-scrolling and vibrating pdf pages. To me this seemed to prove the theory described above. I experimented with various xinput calls and eventually fixed the situation by disabling the default pointer pointer.
After having minimized the list of commands needed to resolve the middle button scroll issue, I decided to restore normal button mapping and re-enable middle button paste. Actually, it does not conflict with middle button scroll at all. Just tapping/clicking the middle button triggers the paste action (or normal middle button action as defined for the actual application) while keeping it pressed enters wheel emulation mode - and releasing it does not fire the normal click event. The timout for a normal middle button click is configured to 200 ms which seems to work fine for me.
$ xinput enable "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"
$ xinput disable "<default pointer>"
$ # quickly click on middle button to paste, hold it down to start scrolling
These are the minimal commands I use to fix the TrackPoint behavior whenever it occurs.
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