Mapping Trackball Buttons

For years, I've used a Logitech M570 wireless trackball with my Linux Mint PC. I generally prefer trackballs to mice -- no need to lift and reposition after a bunch of movement -- and I find that using my thumb, rather than my index finger (or, if I'm in a bad mood, my middle finger) to move the cursor is less fatiguing for my hand and wrist. The M570 works fine with Linux (at least Mint and Ubuntu) with no need for additional drivers.

In addition to the usual (at least for non-Mac users) three main buttons (left, write and combination scroll wheel/third button), the M570 has a couple of secondary buttons, which Logitech describes as "large, easy-to-reach Back/Forward buttons". I'm not sure I'd agree about "large", but I agree that they are easy to reach, and up until my most recent operating system upgrade I would have agreed they acted as back and forward buttons. Prior to the upgrade (and with no special configuration on my part, at least that I can remember), the extra buttons acted like page up and page down in every web browser or document reader that I used. After the upgrade (and switch from the Cinnamon desktop to the Mate desktop), their behavior changed. In the Firefox web browser, they would switch among tabs rather than vertically scrolling the current tab. In Xreader and Acrobat Reader, they also did not move forward backward among pages. (I don't recall trying to read multiple documents at once to see if they would switch among open documents.)

I find the forward/backward action rather handy with multipage documents and long web pages, so I wanted the previous behavior back. It turned out (after some research) not to be hard to do.

The first step is to install the xbindkeys and xautomation packages, both available from the Canonical repositories. This can be done via Synaptic or by running

     sudo apt-get install xbindkeys
     sudo apt-get install xautomation

in a terminal. (I also installed xbindkeys-config, which xbindkeys "suggests", but I don't think it's really necessary.) The xautomation package provides a command xte that can fake a key press.

The second step is to determine what button numbers are assigned to the forward and backward buttons. Run

     xev | grep -i button

in a terminal. This will open a small window with a target. Position the cursor over that window and click each of the buttons. You will see two messages in the terminal for each button, one for the press and one for the release. Look for the button numbers. For me, they were button 8 for forward and button 9 for backward, but your mileage may vary.

The third step is to configure xbindkeys to translate the extra trackball buttons appropriately. The configuration for xbindkeys is kept in a plain text file named .xbindkeysrc in your home directory (~/.xbindkeysrc). You can either create a new one (if you don't have one yet, or if there is nothing in it you want to keep) containing the lines below, or append those lines to the existing file, using your choice of text editor.

# Key bindings for Logitech M570 trackball
"xte 'key Page_Up'"
b:9
"xte 'key Page_Down'"
b:8

If your button numbers differ from mine (8 and 9), edit the lines accordingly. Note carefully the single and double quotation marks; xte seems a bit finicky about them.

Finally, you'll want to test this. You need to restart xbindkeys to get it to read the modified configuration file. Theoretically you can do this by running

     killall -HUP xbindkeys

in a terminal, but I found it necessary to restart the X server (after closing any applications using it, such as my web browser and email client). Typically Control+Alt+Backspace will do the trick. After that, try the trackball keys and hopefully they'll behave as expected.