Setting up click-to-scroll on Linux

One thing I miss from Windows is the ability to hold down the mouse scroll wheel to rapidly move up or down a page. It's one of those minor annoyances that hardly even rises to the level of being worth thinking about. But today for whatever reason I felt the urge to scratch that itch.

I found the solution on the ArchLinux wiki. Create a file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/00-mouse.conf:

Section "InputClass" Identifier "system-mouse" MatchIsPointer "on" Option "ScrollMethod" "button" Option "ScrollButton" "2" EndSection

I ended up setting ScrollButton to 3 since I like the ergonomics better, but that's it. Reboot and you're good to go. If you don't want to do a full reboot, you can just restart Xorg. On Ubuntu that's sudo systemctl restart display-manager. This will close any open programs, so be sure to save any work first!