Modify the mouse scroll wheel speed in the Linux system.

The default mouse wheel behavior in Linux is often too slow, which sometimes gives me the illusion that Linux is lagging. Unlike Windows, it doesn't allow you to directly adjust the mouse wheel speed across all applications. But don't worry—you can use a tool called imwheel to fix this!

Installation

Debian-based:

sudo apt install imwheel

Arch:

sudo pacman -S imwheel

Configuration

Create the ~/.imwheelrc file.

nano ~/.imwheelrc

Edit the content:

".*"
None,      Up,   Button4, 4
None,      Down, Button5, 4
Control_L, Up,   Control_L|Button4
Control_L, Down, Control_L|Button5
Shift_L,   Up,   Shift_L|Button4
Shift_L,   Down, Shift_L|Button5

Run

Run the test

imwheel

Run again

imwheel kill

If you see the prompt, it's successful.

Add to startup items to avoid manually running it every time you start up. You can use Gnome Tweak Tool to add this, but I recently discovered that systemd supports user-level services, and I learned the specific usage from the Arch Wiki.

Using systemd User-Level Service

Create the ~/.config/systemd/user/imwheel.service file.

Edit the content as follows:

[Unit]
Description=IMWheel
Wants=display-manager.service
After=display-manager.service

[Service]
Type=simple
Environment=XAUTHORITY=%h/.Xauthority
ExecStart=/usr/bin/imwheel -d
ExecStop=/usr/bin/pkill imwheel
RemainAfterExit=yes

[Install]
WantedBy=graphical.target

Enable the service using the following commands:

 systemctl --user daemon-reload
 systemctl --user enable --now imwheel
 journalctl --user --unit imwheel

References

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/IMWheel
• https://blog.lilydjwg.me/2014/2/2/systemd-user-daemons.42631.html

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