Double left clicking is used all over the typical graphical desktops, i.e. Gnome, KDE, etc. Many people have mouses with more than three (or "five") buttons. In addition to left, middle, right, and the wheel scrollers, many modern mice include thumb buttons and other extra buttons. One in particular, my new Evoluent Vertical Mouse 2 (www.evoluent.com - an ergonomic mouse flipped on its side to reduce wrist and shoulder strain) features two extra buttons. Using the Windows driver, one can assign these buttons to just about anything. By default, the fourth button is assigned to be "double click," i.e. you can click anything with the fourth button and the driver will emulate a double left click. For ergonomic reasons, this feature is very valuable, as it reduces the amount of clicking one must do by a significant percentage. It would be nice to get this kind of functionality into an X server. I tried looking at the documentation for imwheel, but unfortunately they only allow one to map mouse events to keystrokes. One Debian developer told me the only way to get true support for this would be a modification to the x server. Thus this feature request. I would love to attack this problem myself but I have nearly no experience hacking XFree86 or XOrg. I am open to any questions, elaborations, or debate. Thanks.
I believe the new Xevie extension would allow a client to map button presses to other events such as double button presses or keystrokes, but have not confirmed this. Perhaps reading http://www.freedesktop.org/Software/XEvIE and the associated docs would be a good place to start, with questions to xorg@freedesktop.org as needed.
Thanks for the pointer. I'm going to do some research on xevie and see what I can figure out. In the meanwhile, maybe you guys should check this out: http://bugs.xfree86.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1184 This is the same feature request reported to xfree86's bugzilla, with a patch that adds at least partial support for it. Perhaps this is valuable in the way of getting this supported in xorg.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 322 ***
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