How to right click

Wed, 04 Dec 2024 16:51:35 -0000
pdo, debian, eng

I climbed on top of a mountain with a beautiful view, and when I started readying my new laptop for a work call (as one does on top of mountains), I realised that I couldn't right click and it kind of spoiled the mood.

Clicking on the bottom right corner of my touchpad left-clicked. Clicking with two fingers left-clicked. Alt-clicking, Super-clicking, Control-clicking, left clicked.

Here's there are two ways to simulate mouse buttons with touchpads in Wayland:

clicking on different areas at the bottom of the touchpad

double or triple-tapping, as long as the fingers are not too far apart

Skippable digression:

I'm not sure why Gnome insists in following Macs for defaults, which is what people with non-Mac hardware are less likely to be used to.

In my experience, Macs are as arbitrarily awkward to use as anything else, but they managed to build a community where if you don't understand how it works you get told you're stupid. All other systems (including Gnome) have communities where instead you get told (as is generally the case) that the system design is stupid, which at least gives you some amount of validation in your suffering.

Oh well.

How to configure right click

Surprisingly, this is not available in Gnome Shell settings. It can be found in gnome-tweaks: under "Keyboard & Mouse", "Mouse Click Emulation", one can choose between "Fingers" or "Area".

I tried both and went for "Area": I use right-drag a lot to resize windows, and I couldn't find a way, at least with this touchpad, to make it work consistently in "Fingers" mode.