Trackpoint keyboard natural scrolling with middle button

[fredjonze]

XBC V 2.19.2
Windows 10
Lenovo Trackpoint Keyboard VII with middle button depress for trackpoint scrolling
Lenovo 920 tiny
Occurs before and after XMBC
Occurs all the time, version independent
Used XMBC 3 days
English

Problem: I want to enable 'natural' scrolling with the Lenovo Trackpoint Keyboard VII. I've tried manually with Regedit, changing FlipFlopScroll and FlipFlopWheel. I've tried AutoHotKey. Finally I've tried XMBC. In all instances, when I change the scroll direction from default to natural, any scrolling action begins 'vibrating' the window contents up and down very rapidly. It's almost as if the change is 'fighting' a configuration at a much deeper level. In other words, an XMBC reverse scroll direction feature sends a command for an 'up scroll' and something else is sending a contradictory command for 'down scroll'. The effect is that the affected window contents just rapidly vibrates up and down. When I was using autohotkey, I would frequently get messages of hundreds of instances of it being called every second.

Regards,

Fred

[phil]

Maybe there is something sending the "wrong" type of scroll message. XMBC (and I presume the others) uses a mouse hook to intercept WM_WHEELSCROLL messages which are usually sent by the device driver. Perhaps something is also send a WM_SCROLL type message to the window directly.

Given that every way of doing it suffers the same problem, Maybe its the touchpad drivers itself (is it a touchpad?). Have you tried plugging in another device (mouse) and see if that works or suffers the same way? Try removing the touchpad drivers (and or software if there is any running) and see if it makes a difference (I'm not saying do this permamently - that might be problematic but to just rule it in/out)

Microsoft have a tool in their dev suite called Spy++ (I think you can get it outside of visual studio but not 100% sure) that will show all messages sent to a window (and in some cases where it came from) but it wont show mouse hook messages. It may be interesting to see what messages are being sent though. There are other (better) tools that may give more information like APIMonitor http://www.rohitab.com/apimonitor but its more complicated and difficult to use. This may help track down the source of the messages, but equally it may not - it may just show the messages.

Not sure what else to suggest.

[fredjonze]

Phil,

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll work on finding the messages.

This is a 'Trackpoint' , or the 'eraser head' found in Lenovo laptops. Lenovo has been selling standalone keyboards the are exactly like the ones in the laptops. I like them because of the keyboard feel, and I'm more easily able to control the eraser head with hand tremors.

I have several trackballs where their drivers have built in scroll swap. Those work okay, but they're using their own drivers. I've reinstalled the keyboard drivers several times with no change.

I'll let you know what I find. There are lots of other folks wanting to do this, but not so much luck with a solution.

[phil]

Oh you mean the little joystick thingy? Used to have those on old Dell laptops too - not seen one for a while! How do you scroll with that though - does to change between moving the cursor and scrolling (just curious!)

[fredjonze]

Phil,

I got a copy of spyxx installed.

Notes:
1. I used Edge as a test
2. Used the find window function to get the handle to the window
3. For messages types, used mouse and keyboard
4. Also enabled 'all windows' for tracking
5. No messages were captured from the Edge window
6. I did get messages from a file explorer window
7. The file explorer messages, when scrolling, were 'WM_MOUSEWHEEL'
8. You scroll by holding down the middle button and moving the eraser head
9. I searched the registry, no entries for WM_MOUSEWHEEL
10. Wondering if the combo of the middle button down and tracepoint is only send a specific kind of message to the Lenovo keyboard driver....so it isn't seen by spyxx the normal way.

Thoughts?

[phil]

Edge, being a "modern" window app may do things a bit differently. I'm sure the messages must be there somewhere - but maybe they get routed a different way that Spy is not so good at showing (modern windows are a bit of a pain actually). I wonder if that's the root problem - does the invert scrolling work in file explorer or does it fight in that too?

I have seen mouse software send different messages to scroll windows in the past and was wondering if that was going on here, but then inverting in XMBC wouldn't work at all I suspect (rather than fighting).