Horizontal scrolling in Firefox to Shift+Mouse Scroll (instead of Back/Forward)
Here's how I finally got it work. I put it in very detailed form, so anyone can follow it easily.
1) Open terminal (Ctrl
+Alt
+T
)
2) In terminal, run following commands:
sudo apt-get install xautomation
sudo apt-get install xbindkeys
3) Create a new file called .xbindkeysrc.scm
to your home directory, by running in terminal
gedit ~/.xbindkeysrc.scm
4) Add the following text to the file, save it, and close the text editor:
; bind shift + vertical scroll to horizontal scroll events
(xbindkey '(shift "b:4") "xte 'mouseclick 6'")
(xbindkey '(shift "b:5") "xte 'mouseclick 7'")
5) In terminal, run command
xbindkeys
6) With Firefox browser, go to address about:config
7) Change following values (double click on value)
mousewheel.with_shift.action
to 0
(from the default 2
)
mousewheel.with_shift.action.override_x 1
to 1
(from the default -1
)
8) Now Shift+Mouse Scroll
should lead to horizontal scrolling on Firefox, instead of the default Back
/Forward
action.
Extra information:
3) .xbindkeysrc.scm
is a hidden file (because it starts with a dot), and that's why you cannot see it with nautilus
or other filesystem browser by default. You can hit Ctrl+H
to see hidden files.
5) It seems, that you have to run it only once -- not at every time you log on. I also tried removing the xbindkeys
and the horizontal scroll worked until next reboot/login.
7) If you set them as 1
, -1
, you will get "diagonal scroll" when trying to scroll fast. That's why I think it is necessary to use options 0
, 1
instead of 1
, -1
.
You can disable the Back/Forward
functionality, by going into about:config
and modifying mousewheel.with_shift.action
to 1
instead of the default 2
.
I could not find a way to enable horizontal scrolling using the mousewheel as you see in Google Chrome but the left and right arrow keys do the job. However, I came across this:
Configure your Linux key binding to make Shift+Mouse wheel send an horizontal scroll event:
Install
xbindkeys
andxautomation
. Edit~/.xbindkeysrc.scm
and write:; bind shift + vertical scroll to horizontal scroll events (xbindkey '(shift "b:4") "xte 'mouseclick 6'") (xbindkey '(shift "b:5") "xte 'mouseclick 7'")
Run xbindkeys
Source
Note that I have not tried the above myself!
You may also want to look at [Shift + Mouse-Scroll-Wheel] Does NOT Scroll Horizontally
Fortunately, there is a Firefox add-on for exactly this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/shift-scroll/ Works great for me in Firefox 50.1.0