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Friday, February 08, 2013

Disabling the side mouse button on Evoluent vertical mouse on linux

I switched to the Evoluent vertical mouse after RSI in my wrist. The mouse is great once you get used to it. However, I'm annoyed by its top side button. It gets hit accidentally while browsing and ends up triggerring the back button on a web page. I don't like that.

To disable, figure out the device ID for the Evoluent mouse:
$ xinput list

In my case, the id was 8.
The buttons are listed in order and "xinput query-state 8" shows me that there are 14 of them, as listed under "Button Labels".

Button Labels (254): "Button Left" (124), "Button Middle" (125), "Button Right" (126), "Button Wheel Up" (127), "Button Wheel Down" (128), "Button Horiz Wheel Left" (129), "Button Horiz Wheel Right" (130), "Button Side" (242), "Button Extra" (243), "Button Forward" (244), "Button Unknown" (241), "Button Unknown" (241), "Button Unknown" (241), "Button Unknown" (241)

The "Button Side" is at the 8th position.

So all that I needed to do was to switch off the button at the 8th position.

$ xinput set-button-map 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0 9 10 11 12 13 14

That's it. No more accidentally pressing the back button.