Natural scrolling not working in Empathy contact list window

[Matteo Landi]

I am an owner of a Apple Magic Trackpad and I configured Xmodmap in order to enable "natural scrolling" with the following line:

pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 7 6 8 9 10 11 12

I noticed that even if it works as expected inside a chat window, the same can not be said for the contact list: in such window, swiping fingers upside-down makes the scrollbar move to the bottom instead of to the top.

If in need of more information/logs, please ask me.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

thanks for the bug report
have you enabled two finger scrolling or right edge scrolling ?
any visual way you can share ?(video etc).

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

I have checked right now have both settings enabled get the same behaviour using either two fingers or right edge scrolling.

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

Have checked right now and I have both settings enabled; moreover I am getting the same behaviour using either two fingers or right edge scrolling.

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

tell me your ubuntu and empathy version ?

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and empathy's version is 3.4.2-0ubuntu1

[Bilal Shahid (s9iper1)]

i need the specific steps to reproduce this bug
and
i also need a video of this affect how it looks like

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

Right now I can not create a video nor share my desktop so I will try to explain the problem in more details.

Imagine to have a vanilla Ubuntu, you open a terminal and type dmesg. If you have a trackpad with double fingers scrolling enabled and you want to see what dmesg printed first, you need to place two fingers at the bottom of the trackpad and swipe them to the top.

Now, if you want to enable natural scrolling (i.e. swipe top-down to scroll a page up, like in smartphones or tablets), you can for example use Xmodmap and use that settings contained in the bug description.

If you open again a terminal and try to follow the steps presented above, you will notice that to scroll the terminal up, you will have to swipe top-down. That means hich means that the Xmodmap setting has been properly honored by gnome-terminal.

Now back to the Empathy problem: once you enable natural scrolling, it works properly inside chat windows only: if you open the contact list, place the scrollbar at the top and try to swipe bottom-up to reach the bottom of the list, you won't notice any scrollbar movement. On the other hand, if you swipe top-down, the scrollbar starts to move to the bottom of the contact list as if the Xmodmap setting was not honored at all.

Let me know if this description shed some light on the problem.

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

Any news?

[Matteo Landi (landimatte)]

Hi Bilal,

I am so sorry that we can't understand each-others, but before filing the bug to Bugzilla, let me try and explain you the problem another time.

First of all, we are talking about _natural_ scrolling: if you don't know anything that, please have a look at the following video [1]: it is worth a thousand words. As you probably may know, that behavior is not enabled by default on Ubuntu; however, one can simply use Xmodmap and obtain something similar: let's see how.

Inside your Xmodmap configuration file (~user/.Xmodmap) you can map each mouse event to other; for example, the following is the default configuration for the pointer:

    pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Imagine each column being the mouse event received, and each value being the overwritten event associated: in this case output events are matching input events without any transformation (i.e. left-click is a left-click, scroll-up is scroll-up and so forth). Let's see how to enable _natural_ scrolling knowing that event 4 and 5 are for scroll up and down, while 6 and 7 are for left and right scroll:

    pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 7 6 8 9 10 11 12

As you can see, at the 4th column we have the 5th event and at the 5th column we have the 4th event (same for 6th and 7th columns). Basically we are telling Xmodmap to generate a scroll-down event when a scroll-up event is receved and vice-versa (and to generate a scroll-left when a scroll-right is received). You can try it yourself by putting that line in the file and load it with `xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap`.

Now, if you try to scroll a gnome-terminal window, you will notice that the _natural_ scrolling behaviour is correctly enabled. However, the same can not be said for Empathy windows: it seams that the scrolling behaviour is somehow hard-coded in the application, and it cannot be overridden externally.

If you now have understood the issue, could please have a look at it? Thank you.

[1] http://youtu.be/qhEt1Pd-twM

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

seems like similar to bug #966237 (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=674716): "New "Smooth Scroll" does not respect .Xmodmap settings"