Terminal and file manager scrolls inverted

[Carlos]

I'm having this issue, all other programs are scrolling as "Natural Scrolling", just like Mac does, however only Terminal and File browser have "Reversed Scrolling", they should be consistent across apps and programs, maybe it's nautilus the one that inverts the scrolling?

Only could find this issue in Terminal and File Browser, attaching bug info from terminal.

Release version:
Description: Ubuntu 16.10
Release: 16.10

Terminal version:
Not sure, it should be the latest one that comes with this Ubuntu version.

Expected behavior:
I expected to scroll in the same direction as all other apps in my OS.

Current Behavior:
I scrolled up with mouse wheel, with "Natural Scrolling" all apps scroll down, but terminal and file manager scrolls up, it is indeed inverted.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.10
Package: gnome-terminal 3.20.2-1ubuntu5
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.8.0-26.28-generic 4.8.0
Uname: Linux 4.8.0-26-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.3-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Fri Oct 28 22:04:54 2016
ExecutablePath: /usr/lib/gnome-terminal/gnome-terminal-server
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-02-20 (251 days ago)
InstallationMedia:

SourcePackage: gnome-terminal
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to yakkety on 2016-10-16 (12 days ago)

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

FYI: I cannot reproduce this. I'm also on 16.10, both the file browser and gnome-terminal does respect System Settings -> Mouse & Touchpad -> Natural scrolling for me as expected.

[Carlos (luchillo17)]

Are you in a laptop? i'm in a desktop device, and i don't see any option for natural scrolling in the settings, also i'm using a mouse.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Yup I'm on a laptop with touchpad; no mouse.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[J.D. Laub (ubuntu-laubster)]

I'm seeing the same behavior under 16.04, on a desktop with a mouse (no laptop touchpad). There's no "natural scrolling" option in "system settings | mouse & touchpad", so to get natural scrolling, I put this in my ~/.Xmodmap:
    pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
(note 4 & 5 are reversed). Just to be clear, "natural scrolling" means movement is opposite the window's scrollbar: move mousewheel up, & the window scrollbar should move down.

The Xmodmap setting happily affects firefox, chromium, thunderbird, xterm, etc., but not gnome-terminal, files (nautilus), & cool-retro-term.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

I'm still using a touchpad, with "legacy" (not natural) scrolling. For me the command

xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 2 3 5 4'

effects (switches to natural scrolling) firefox, xterm, urxvt, terminology; but keeps legacy scrolling in chromium, gnome-terminal, nautius, gedit, konsole.

Sounds like a generic Gtk+/Qt or GNOME/KDE issue. Or something even weirder. Note that Chromium belongs to a different team for you than for me. Could be a version difference, or could be due to mouse vs. touchpad. It's totally crazy.

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

The old way of mouse wheel scrolling was mice would emit discrete button 4 and 5 events, and scrolling was jumpy.

The new way of mouse wheel scrolling is via XInput2, you get two additional axes (vertical and horizontal scroll events) that give you more fine-grained positions. This way you can get smooth scrolling with a touchpad.

When you remap mouse buttons, this can only affect older applications that do not support smooth mouse wheel scrolling.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Marius, thanks for this info!

gnome-terminal relies on smooth scrolling events at least since vte-0.38 (which appeared in Vivid 15.04), see https://git.gnome.org/browse/vte/commit/?id=7efb04f.

At this moment I'm puzzled what can go wrong on the reporter's computer. Carlos, can you reproduce the issue on Artful?

(By the way, we have an even nastier bug at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774430 – any help resolving that would be highly appreciated!)

[Carlos (luchillo17)]

@egmont-gmail Hi.

I got version 3.20.2, lower in help says "Using VTE version 0.44.2".

None of the following had any effect in my Ubuntu 17.04 in any window, no terminal, no browser, no text editor:

xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 2 3 5 4'
xmodmap -e 'pointer = 1 2 3 4 5'

Lastly if we try that smooth scrolling, how do you configure it? i have a '.Xmodmap' file in home directory with '5' and '4' positions swapped and it seems to be doing nothing.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

> Lastly if we try that smooth scrolling, how do you configure it?

I don't think you can directly configure this, it's already enabled behind the scenes and used for devices that can generate such events.

What you could do is to follow and repeat https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=774430 comment 11, that is, check what your current input method is, and if it's xim then switch to ibus. (I'm suggesting this without having any idea what's going on :P) This could get us one step closer to locating the problem, and maybe even locating some correlation with that other bug.

[Carlos (luchillo17)]

Hi Egmont,

Current input method is already 'ibus'.

Btw i didn't meant to ask how to configure smooth scrolling, i meant how to tell it to invert the scroll for my mouse.

[Egmont Koblinger (egmont-gmail)]

Oh, I misunderstood that then, sorry. I don't know how to configure, I'm only familiar with the graphical option, which, as we've discussed earlier, is missing for you.