Mousewheel on pager should change desktops

What must we do to enable this?

The OS sends mousewheel messages only to active window (that currently have focus), so it seems that required behaviour can't be achieved as simple as i thought.

It's possible to catch mousewheel events globally using SetWindowsHookEx().

Unlike some other win32 hooks WH_MOUSE_LL hook doesn't involve any kind of complex DLL injection.

To demonstrate this I've made a 36 lines C++ program that display a MessageBox() when the the mousewhell is scrolled over a 100 pixels² region at the top-left of the screen.

I think the scrollwheel feature should be optional though. It's a Windows convention that the active window should receive scroll events and it could be confusing to see the desktop change because the mouse cursor happens to be at the wrong place.

Any thought on this kvasdopil?

Updated main.cpp: - Wasn't working on XP because hInstance wasn't passed to SetWindowsHookEx() (Win7 doesn't mind for some reason).

• Modified hook function to call PostMessage() and return. I think we should avoid complex processing there.

• use std::cout instead of MessageBox(). It's a console app after all ;-)

It seems that the touchpad software on my laptop prevents the scroll gesture from being used unless the mouse cursor is directly over a scrollable area.

That would prevents me from changing desktop using the touchpad.

Not necessarily a bad thing as this "feature" prevents the kind of mistake I was worried about in Comment 3.

I've looked into the way my touchpad works in more details.

It's an ALPS touchpad.

It seems the touchpad driver only generates scroll messages when the mouse cursor is over the active Window. There's apparently no way to configure it otherwise but plugging a mouse works just fine.

@kvasdopil - Would you mind if I write a patch for this? I'll understand if you prefer looking into this yourself or if you don't feel like accepting more changes right now.

@alexandre.jasmin - no, patches are welcomed. I'm currently waiting for bjasspa to send me all the patches so i can recompile and publish new binary, so another patches are ok now.

Okay. I'll give it a try.

I have a working patch.

Added two functions mouseHookRegister() and mouseHookCallback(). I've simply put these in an header file include from vwKvasdoPager.cpp which appears to be the style you use.

I haven't bother patching the Visual C++ project to add that new header since it probably will be replaced soon anyways.

The code is not too complex. mouseHookCallback() just intercepts mouse wheel events over the page and PostMessage(VW_CHANGEDESK) to VirtualWin.

I haven't bothered adding an option to disable the mouse wheel. I'm not sure that's a good idea anymore and I'm not going to write a preference dialog just for this.

Attaching a build with the patch applied on top of SVN r10

@wallace.ww - If you want to try this just replace the file in "C:\Program Files\VirtuaWin\modules" by that one.

Patch with more coherent coding style.

The previous patch one had two cases of "space before an if" and one "open brace on the same line".

New patch using WindowFromPoint() to verify if the mouse cursor is over the pager.

I was previously checking if the mouse cursor was inside the pager rectangle using GetWindowRect() but that was bogus since a window could be covering it.

Attaching a new build with the above patch applied on top of SVN r10

One renaming problem is that you can't move the mouse all the way to the edge of the screen and use the wheel because its are a few pixel outside the pager.

I'm trying to figure out a clean way to fix this.

I would like the mouse wheel to work when the mouse cursor is at the edge of the screen (i.e. two pixels bellow the pager if the taskbar is at bottom of the screen).

It's just much easier to move the mouse at the edge than directly above the pager.

However I'd prefer to wait until bjasspa changes are checked-in before looking into this. I've noticed that on bjasspa's build with themes are enabled I can no longer switch between desktops by clicking at the edge of the screen. It was working before and still works when themes are turned off.

So I'd prefer to wait for all the changes to get merged before I look at both the "clcking at the edge" and "scrolling at the edge" issues.

I think my mouse wheel patch is still usable in its current form though.

the patch is applied great job!

i'll defer closing this issue until solution for the 'edge problem' will be found, is it ok?

I've opened Issue 30 to track the 'edge problem'. I suppose you can close this one.

I've also opened Issue 31 to suggest the addition of some configurable parameters for the mousewheel.