X Windows' mouse pointer acceleration sucks!
 

I have a trackpoint on my laptop, and the pointer moves very slowly for the amount I move it. This is bad because then you tend to push really hard on the trackpoint to make it go faster. After a few days:

1. You have a painful indentation in your finger.
2. Your trackpoint breaks. (Yes, I have replaced mine twice.)

So I learned that you can change the mouse parameters with xset. There are two parameters, threshold and acceleration. You type:

xset m 8 3

and it moves at regular 1:1 speed inside of a little area, but if you move fast enough that it is outside 3 pixels within x amount of time (>3 pixels per sample?) it then moves the pointer in jumps of 8.

This is two speeds, slow and fast, and it sucks. 8 3 is the best I have found so far, but I still don't like it. With a trackpoint it is awful. I am constantly overshooting my target and then very slowly trying to move it to the precise location without making it jump again. I was reading around endlessly trying to find alternatives, and see that the mouse goes through an input device and then through GPM? and then into x windows or something? I am a newb and don't know the details, but is there some way we can put an extra layer in between there to give smooth "logarithmic" acceleration instead of two-level thresholded jumpiness? For instance, setting xset acceleration to never happen, and then letting another program or driver or something do some math on the mouse values before they get to x windows to make them accelerate smoothly? Are there downloadable packages for this sort of thing? I seem to remember knoppix KDE having a smoother acceleration, but it could be my imagination.

Found the following by Google:

How to change the mouse speed in X?
Extracted from personal email
Tip provided by Cooper

The xset command works ok, but never really did it for me.
One that did was to add a "Resolution = ..." to the Pointer section in
/etc/XF86Config
I use 200 over here and it's just what I wanted.



I believe the correct file to edit is /etc/X11/XF86Config ...or xorg.conf

HTH

yes i saw that somewhere, too. I changed the value around several times but never noticed any difference. What is it supposed to do, exactly? There were two other changes, too:

From here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=196629

Is there any way to get a gradual acceleration instead of the two-speed type?

drop the sample rate and put resolution at 500, and then tell me how it went.
I recomment on setting the threshold to 0, and the acceleration to something you like, and then you will have one speed, like in windows

i will try that when i get home. do you know specific instructions for libranet? which exact file do i edit? remember, i am very new to linux...

windows doesn't have one speed. it uses a gradual or "logarithmic" acceleration (probably not a true logarithm, but i have heard it called that). If you have it switched on, you can tell by moving across the screen very slowly and then moving back across the screen quickly. the mouse will not be in the same position it started from.

Looking at your posts, I think perhaps your syntax may have been incorrect. Look at the sample (not mine) I printed. This is from /etc/X11/XF86Config or /etc/X11/xorg.conf. That is likely why you saw no effect from your previous edits.

Which file you edit will depend on whether your distro is using XFree86 or Xorg. Most have switched to Xorg, but I don't use libranet and thus I don't know how recent your version is. If the only file you see in /etc/X11 is XF86Cofig edit that (as root of course) else edit xorg.conf - they are virtually the same (for now anyway).

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "trackpoint"
Driver "mouse"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Buttons" "6"
Option "Resolution" "800" <----- lookie lookie ;)
Option "SampleRate" "200" <----- here too!
EndSection

Also, read the man pages. Incredibly exciting. Really.

HTH

Ok. I figured some things out.

From http://www.xfree86.org/4.1.0/XF86Config.5.html

So I looked in etc/X11/ and found XF86Config-4, and nothing else that looks like it, so I edited it (with dedit. What is a good basic gui editor with very small learning curve?). It now says:

Setting sample rate low made it worse. Resolution settings seemed to have no effect at all. What are these settings supposed to do?

as I said, delete the samplerate, and put resolution to 500, and try again....
you were right about the windows acceleration, I forgot about it.... itll be kinda like that in linux...

As I said, I changed the resolution around a few times (including 500) and it didn't seem to have any effect. Changing the samplerate had an effect, but it seemed to be better at a high rate. I don't know how high it is allowed to go.

as high as the sky my friend

I think I found the solution, but as a newb I have NO idea how to use it:

http://www.apia.dhs.org/software/macc/

I don't understand why this doesn't annoy the %$#^ out of everyone. Maybe using a trackpoint magnifies the annoyance of the problem?

As I said, I tried increasing the resolution to 200 in both my /etc/X11/XFree86config-4 and in my user /x11/xfree86config no effect in either. what do i do now? i think the resolution parameter would be the key, but it doesn't do anything.

For the record, "Samplerate" and "Resolution" settings in XF86Config / xorg.conf are ignored if you are running a 2.6 kernel.

Vojtech Pavlik who maintains the kernel level driver says:
"...* 2.4 users who have set up different speed/res/scale values in XF86Config, because those are ignored in 2.6"