Comment 9 for bug 1032500

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