I recently bought a new trackball, since my Logitech M510 stubbornly keeps sending double clicks whenever I click on it. This new trackball is the Kensington Expert Mouse - KEM (odd name, I figure if Kensington does sell mice named “Kensington Expert Trackball…).

Four buttons

The trackaball presents 4 buttons, a scroll whell and a very big ball right in the middle of it. The two bottom buttons are correctly mapped to right and left buttons. The top one’s are the ones I dislike.

The problem is that I didn’t like the upper right button mapped to middle click. I would like the upper left mapped to it instead.

Fortunately KEM has 4 programmable buttons. If you’re using Windows/OSX and install his software, that is.

When one uses Ubuntu as OS things became a little more trickier. But not much.

Simples way to fix that is to use xinput to find out the name of the device (I wouldn’t use the id, since it changes everytime):

$ xinput                                                                                    
⎡ Virtual core pointer                    	id=2	[master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer              	id=4	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Logitech M570                           	id=12	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Kensington      Kensington Expert Mouse 	id=13	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Broadcom Corp. Bluetooth USB Host Controller	id=15	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ bcm5974                                 	id=17	[slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                   	id=3	[master keyboard (2)]

Then simply input:

xinput set-button-map "Kensington      Kensington Expert Mouse" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 2

The last 2 means middle click, and it’s position on the list represents the upper left button. I’m kepping the upper right button as is, since I don’t use it.

Persisting

Simply add the aforementioned command to startup applications. And that’s it.