Comment 20 for bug 951123

So natural scrolling is part of something larger called smooth scrolling in Gnome and it's automatically enabled if it picks up on a tablet or some other ultra-portable medium. But where does leave us mouse/pad users --be that of desktops or laptops-- that prefer natural scrolling? Apparently, the answer is that we're on our own because xmodmap (or at least natural scrolling initiated via xmodmap) is an unsupported hack ("unsupported configuration ... gnome-tweak to enable weird options").

The more I thought about this problem, the more I came closer to realizing a few things.

1. Natural scrolling via xmodmap (and gtk+ or qt) is NOT a hack, and less an unsupported one for that matter. How do I know this? Because I remembered that xmodmap is an Xorg utility. We still use Xorg, after all.

2. My .Xmodmap is indeed being picked up; I know this because I've reassigned some keys and they're implemented properly. So, gtk+/gnome is selectively not picking up on the reverse scrolling directive. Therefore, what's happening here is that gtk+/Gnome is not abiding by X protocols. In other words, gtk/Gnome is at fault here and in that sense it IS most certainly a bug.

3. I can only assume that in their desire to cater to the ultra-portable market Gnome devs have forgotten about xmodmap, in as far as scrolling direction (they do have event structures and something called GdkScrollDirection ), and hard coded directionality with their "smooth scrolling". And this is probably the source of the bug.

Solution
Allow user intervention. This is not unheard of as “Reverse Scrolling Direction” under System Settings is already implemented by KDE (see http://imagecdn.maketecheasier.com/2011/09/naturalscrolling-kde.png).

Aside
The Ubuntu app called naturalscrolling does not work and seems to have messed with other key reassignments, by the way, when I tried it.