deskthority

Hi all, wondering if anyone else has encountered this problem and if there is a solution.

I got a Kensington Orbit trackball for Christmas this year (the 2-button model with scroll ring) which is set up (through Kensington's own software on Windows) to middle-click when both buttons are pressed. However, I often find that it sends a double middle click - this is especially annoying when web browsing, as when using middle-click to 'open link in new tab' it frequently opens two of the same tab. Likewise when I middle click to 'close tab', it will often close the tab in question and the next tab in the row.

I am very sure it's not because my hands are shaky because a) I've been experimenting a bit and that doesn't seem to be it and b) it doesn't seem to be the case on Linux where that feature is set by an xinput rule (there is no Kensington software for Linux, unsurprisingly).

Hello, I'm new here, in fact I just registered to reply to this thread. I have Orbit with Scroll Ring as well and under Windows 7 I experience the same thing - some "middle clicks" are doubled. I however noticed, that when I try to press left button (in my case it's the right physical button, because I use trackball with my right hand, but when I switch to the other hand and reassign buttons, it's allways the button which is assigned as left) slightly earlier than the right in the "middle click" gesture, it does not double anything. It's quite tricky to do so, because it still has to be pressed more or less at the same time, but when I try, I have no duplicate tabs in Firefox.

Yeah, that's basically what I have learnt to do. Just press them at quite precisely the same time. I think it's a kind of 'debouncing' or 'ghosting' issue in the software - not sure about the technical term. Weirdly enough, using the trackball on Linux with no official Kensington software (just xinput configured to use 2-button click as middle-click) there's no double-middle-clicking issues. Strange.

Maybe I should try playing around with the double click timeout in the Windows settings?

I was playing with all the settings I could find, but with no success, the best way seems to be concentrating to pressing left button slightly earlier, but not too much. I haven't connected the trackball to Linux box yet, however it's nice to know, that there it works right. Orbit was my first step on the way from cheap keyboard&mouse to something better and at the moment the only step I managed to make, so I would like to keep it few years.

Yeah, you just have to do a simple xinput rule to get middle-click to work. Of course, there are myriad other options you could configure, but that's the only one I need.

The only thing I have to figure out now is if you can get xinput to identify it by name instead of number as the number changes if the PC boots up with a different number of USB devices...

I really like it as a device. It wasn't too expensive, but looks good (I just love the colour of the ball - the slight metal fleck is gorgeous!), feels good and works good.