Recently I faced the problem that after applying some updates (I cannot remember if it was X11 or Gnome) the vertical scrolling direction got inverted. That is, scrolling down in a PDF document with the mouse wheel did not move a page down, but a page up! Unfortunately this behaviour affected every application …
All settings I found - from Gnome settings, following xmodmap, udev and others - only solved the problem partially or did not solve it at all. With partially solving I mean that it either solved the problem only for applications not written with the GTK toolkit ore vice-versa.
Finally I manged to solve the problem by simply adding a file to my autostart folder for Gnome that triggers xinput to set the natural scrolling to zero. To find the right settings I had to do the following:
First I ran xinput list to get a list of all available input devices. Here is what it looks like on my virtual machine:
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ VirtualBox mouse integration id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ ImExPS/2 BYD TouchPad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
From this I took the information that the id of the relevant mouse pointer was 11. Knowing the id I could now run xinput --list-props 11 which presented me with a list of available settings, their current value as well as their default value(s).
Device 'ImExPS/2 BYD TouchPad':
Device Enabled (119): 1
Coordinate Transformation Matrix (121): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
libinput Accel Speed (272): 0.000000
libinput Accel Speed Default (273): 0.000000
libinput Accel Profiles Available (274): 1, 1
libinput Accel Profile Enabled (275): 1, 0
libinput Accel Profile Enabled Default (276): 1, 0
libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled (262): 1
libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled Default (263): 0
libinput Send Events Modes Available (242): 1, 0
libinput Send Events Mode Enabled (243): 0, 0
libinput Send Events Mode Enabled Default (244): 0, 0
libinput Left Handed Enabled (264): 0
libinput Left Handed Enabled Default (265): 0
libinput Scroll Methods Available (266): 0, 0, 1
libinput Scroll Method Enabled (267): 0, 0, 0
libinput Scroll Method Enabled Default (268): 0, 0, 0
libinput Button Scrolling Button (269): 2
libinput Button Scrolling Button Default (270): 274
libinput Middle Emulation Enabled (277): 0
libinput Middle Emulation Enabled Default (278): 0
Device Node (245): "/dev/input/event1"
Device Product ID (246): 2, 6
libinput Drag Lock Buttons (271): <no items>
libinput Horizonal Scroll Enabled (247): 1
Now, what I had to change was the setting for Natural Scrolling Enabled (262). This was set to 1 and I had to set it to 0. Finally, the command I had to run was:
xinput set-prop 11 262 0
And since I did not want to run this command every time I log in or restart my system, I simply put it in a startup file for Gnome. Here is the content of that file which I put into ~/.config/autostart/mouseinvert.desktop
#!/usr/bin/env xdg-open
[Desktop Entry]
Version=1.0
Type=Application
Terminal=true
Icon[en_US]=gnome-panel-launcher
Name[en_US]=mouseInvert
Exec=bash -c 'xinput set-prop 11 262 0'
Name=mouseInvert
Icon=gnome-panel-launcher
To apply this system wide for all users you should put this file into /etc/xdg/autostart.
The above startup folder should work for Unity, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE. For KDE use ~/.kde/Autostart/ or /usr/share/autostart/.
Supplement
It might happen that numbers from xinput --list-props change. That’s exactly what happened to me after today’s
update of some Xorg libraries: libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled (262) changed to libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled (261) and value 262 now pointed to libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled Default (262). Consequently calling xinput set-prop 11 262 0 changed the wrong value and even raised an error like the following:
X Error of failed request: BadAccess (attempt to access private resource denied)
Major opcode of failed request: 131 (XInputExtension)
Minor opcode of failed request: 57 ()
Serial number of failed request: 19
Current serial number in output stream: 20