Holding the middle mouse button while dragging

I’m trying to work in Blender, but to rotate the scene, I need to hold the middle mouse button and drag. How do I do that on the bizarre no-button touch pad of a Librem? Tapping with three fingers acts as a middle mouse button, but dragging doesn’t do anything if you try to drag with three fingers.

1 Like

None of the touchpads I have access to can middle mouse click and drag, I don’t doubt there is at least one touchpad out there that can, but I don’t think it’s a unique issue. A USB mouse may be the easiest solution.

I haven’t used blender, but in other CAD programs I’ve used, shift+click and ctrl+click are used for translation and rotation. Have you tried that?

1 Like

A USB mouse makes it much harder to use the machine on the go, which really defeats the purpose of having a laptop instead of a desktop machine. While I think I’ve seen laptops without a middle-click button, I’ve never seen one without a right-click button before this one, nor have I seen one with the left click embedded under the touchpad, so clicking and dragging has so much precision-preventing friction. These Librems have bizarre mice. Most of the laptops I’ve seen have all three mouse buttons, and many even have the easier-to-use nub mouse. Regardless of what you want to define as “normal”, the Librems aren’t normal, and are rather clunky to work with. They do seem to present unique issues.

I just tried shift clicking and control clicking, and those don’t allow me to rotate the scene in any way.

Just a suggestion for exploring but some distros have configuration/settings options that allow you to determine how you get middle-button.

Likewise, does Blender itself allow you to determine what mouse/keyboard incantations do what?

Sometimes there are “accessibility options” that alter the behaviour in helpful ways.

1 Like

It looks like you’re right. There’s an accessibility option for emulating the middle mouse button. I don’t see an option to emulate the right mouse button, but for now, I don’t need to right-click-and-drag.

Oh my Squid though, these one-button mice are obnoxious.

3 Likes

this is what i wanted to suggest but somebody beat me to it it seems. :slight_smile:

talk-to-the-hand

does it work for you ? the hand thingy i mean ?

1 Like