Mouse scroll wheel direction

Terry60

Terry60

Telephone Sanitizer (2nd Class)
Staff member
Guru,
For years I've had a Trust Mouse (Ami Scroll Pro) which came with a wonderful driver that allowed programming of the mouse 3rd button and speed and direction control of the 2 scroll wheels.

I've always had my wheels set to move the text (not the scroll bar) in the direction of the wheel (ie the opposite of the way the OS does it).

Upgrading to Vista 64, meant getting mostly new hardware including the mouse, whose ball was getting a bit out of shape anyway through old age, so I went for a new Trust mouse with a 64 bit driver, which was a great disappointment, as the multiple mouse buttons were not flexibly programmable (only a few options - none of which I wanted), and the wheel direction lost its reversibility.

I downloaded MS's Intellipoint optional mouse driver, and by telling it a lie about which mouse was attached (picking a MS mouse with a similar button layout) am using it to reprogramme the mouse buttons the way I want them.

Some 3rd party software which lost scroll support, has subsequently been fixed by downloading the "flywheel" mouse driver add-on ( a great little utility I can recommend to anyone with scrolling problems).

Sadly though, none of this extra driver software contains what I really want for Christmas - the ability to reverse the scroll wheel direction (vertical and horizontal).
Any chance you can write an add-on to my add-on that gives an option to reverse mouse scroll wheel direction ?

Or alternatively - have you any idea where this information is ( Is there a registry flag that can be flipped.) It must be possible, my old mouse did it for years on ME and XP.
 
Hey Terry, sorry for the delay this thread slipped under my radar :smile:

This isn't the kind of thing we would make an application for, but I'll look around for you and see if I can't find a registry hack that woud accomplish what you need.
 
Found it !!
just found a free app "X-Mouse", which does what I want (and a gazillion other things too, which I'll have to investigate).
I've now got my scroll wheel behaving the way I wanted (the way my old mouse on the backup PC works), and as a bonus I can remove Wizmouse, because it replaces its functionality too (scrolling the Window under the cursor without changing focus)
Only problem is, after 3 1/2 years of doing things the "wrong" (normal) way, I'm going to have to unlearn the behaviour and re-program my index finger.
 
Lol - are you sure you still want the reversed direction?
OS X Lion reversed the direction by default (in the beta) and everyone went crazy.
 
My first wheel mouse (the aforementioned) came with a driver that enabled direction switching and I instinctively wanted it to move the data being viewed in the wheel direction, not a virtual pan of the screen along the data. (Seems natural and logical to me. After all, it's the data that moves, not the monitor)
As a check that my brain was not miswired, I invited my wife (an instictive and natural technophobe) to sit at the screen containing a long document, and read down it. I deliberately didn't give her any hint about the wheel direction, just let her use it.
She immediately used the wheel in the same sense as me, and read down the page without a problem, so that clinched the decision.
I continued for years, and only when the mouse-ball developed a blister and became sticky and annoying, did I upgrade the mouse with this newest PC.
I was mortified (despite being the same OEM) to find the driver was lacking in standard features of the older mouse, hence my OP.
The old mouse is still on the backup (XP) PC, so I've had to get used to brain-switching when I occasionally use both at once.
It'll be a pleasure to standardize, and I expect it'll only be a matter of days before any tendency to use the "wrong" way will have been unlearned.
Just because the rest of the world does it that way doesn't make them right !
(There was a time when all left-handed children were forced to write right-handed in school. They all got used to it, as you have with the mouse scroll (and I did for 3 years), but that's just a forced behaviour. Let yourself go - act naturally. You'll thank me later.)

Have a look at the options in X-mouse btw.
I'm only using the scroll reverse, but there are options to customize your mouse on an ap-by-app basis to do just about anything you can imagine. I might use a few of those in the future.
 
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You know what's funny/sad? I just realized I've been using x-mouse for a few years on my desktop as an alternative to the logitech control center!

Now I'm feeling bad I never looked into it deeper!
 
FlipFlopWheel

There is a registry setting named FlipFlopWheel that does this!HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\HID\????\????\Device ParametersThere might be multiple mouse entries.The default value for FlipFlopWheel should already ready 0. Change into 1 and replug in the mouse.
 
Hey darkfader,

Welcome to NeoSmart Technologies! Thanks for sharing this valuable info with us, I'm sure some people here (and most likely Terry if he isn't relying on x-mouse for other behavior modifications) will find this very useful.

:smile:
 
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Yes, thanks fader.
I knew there had to be a registry flag somewhere.
Now just need to workout why there are four of them and why none of them is flipped, though my scroll wheel now works the "right" way thanks to X-mouse
 
Oh, Terry, you'll be very pleased/interested to know that in Mac OS X Lion (released a couple of weeks ago), Apple has decided to make the "reversed" direction the default. They're calling it the "natural scrolling direction." I guess you've been vindicated!

Needless to say, I've disabled this feature :tongueout:
 
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