Sunil Garg

Enable Two-Finger Scrolling in Ubuntu

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Here’s a small hack I stumbled across in the Ubuntu Forums: you can enable support for two-finger scrolling on your Synaptics touchpad with a couple lines added to the “synaptics” section of your /etc/xorg.conf.

Option      "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
Option      "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"

Here’s what the entire section looks like for me:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier  "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver      "synaptics"
    Option      "SendCoreEvents"    "true"
    Option      "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
    Option      "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
    Option      "HorizScrollDelta"  "0"
    Option      "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
    Option      "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
EndSection

There are a lot more options described in the forum thread linked above, like assigning a different mouse click to each corner of the touchpad. Once you make these changes, just restart X (or your computer), and you should be able to scroll with your fingers!

I’m running Ubuntu Feisty with the latest version of the Synaptics driver (synclient -V says 0.14.6), but I think this should work with any distribution or desktop environment, assuming you’re using the Synaptics driver. Additional configuration instructions can be found in the Ubuntu Community Documentation.

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