Felitendo
b7e0ff6fd1
Steam's autoscroll worked, except when it didn't. Every report of that came down to the same thing: Steam started in a way that carried no -noverifyfiles, noticed the patched web helper script, put its own copy back, and spent the session without the flag. There is no way to make every possible way of starting Steam carry an argument - a game launcher, a shortcut, a terminal, another program calling `steam steam://` - so the patch stops depending on it. The check is on size and timestamp, not on content, so the patch is now written to look untouched: the bytes the flag costs come back out of the script's own comments, and the timestamp of the untouched copy is restored afterwards. The file Steam finds is exactly as long and exactly as old as the one it wrote. A client that verifies its files finds nothing to repair. -noverifyfiles stays as the fallback for a script with no comments left to pay for the flag. Two things fall out of that. A patch that keeps the size no longer has to wait for Steam to close, because there is no size mismatch for the client to chase; only the growing one still defers. And an installation patched by the earlier version is quietly redone at the original size on the next apply, so the fix arrives without anyone having to know about it. Then the launch paths that were never covered: - Shortcuts on the desktop itself. Nothing in the XDG search path looks at that folder, so nothing had ever seen them - and Steam writes one there for every game somebody asks for a shortcut to. Its name is translated, so it is read from user-dirs.dirs and handed to the watcher in a drop-in. - Steam as a Flatpak was never recognised as Steam, so its entry got nothing while its script got patched - the worst of both. The switch goes after the application id there, where flatpak passes it on rather than reading it. - steam-native and steam-jupiter, which are ordinary Steam starts under another name, and Flatpak and snap entries in ~/.config/autostart. Two things found on the way: a client update left the undo copy holding the script from before the update, so undoing would have put an old version back; and a shortcut edited in place and later deleted would have been recreated by `disable`.
middleclick-autoscroll
Middle-click autoscroll for Linux. Hold the middle mouse button, move the mouse, the page scrolls — like on Windows. Works with browsers, Electron apps, Flatpaks, snaps, Steam, and anything else that runs on Chromium under the hood.
No app list to maintain. The program looks at what's actually installed, figures out what's Chromium-based, and handles it.
Installing
Arch, CachyOS, EndeavourOS, Manjaro
paru -S middleclick-autoscroll
Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pop!_OS
sudo install -d -m 0755 /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://felitendo.github.io/middleclick-autoscroll/KEY.gpg \
| sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/middleclick-autoscroll.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/middleclick-autoscroll.gpg] https://felitendo.github.io/middleclick-autoscroll/deb ./" \
| sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/middleclick-autoscroll.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install middleclick-autoscroll
Fedora, RHEL, CentOS Stream
sudo curl -fsSL -o /etc/yum.repos.d/middleclick-autoscroll.repo \
https://felitendo.github.io/middleclick-autoscroll/middleclick-autoscroll.repo
sudo dnf install middleclick-autoscroll
openSUSE
sudo rpm --import https://felitendo.github.io/middleclick-autoscroll/KEY.gpg
sudo zypper addrepo --gpgcheck --refresh \
https://felitendo.github.io/middleclick-autoscroll/rpm middleclick-autoscroll
sudo zypper install middleclick-autoscroll
Then run middleclick-autoscroll enable. That's it — nothing else to configure.
Updates come through your package manager like anything else. Without a package,
build from source or grab a .deb/.rpm from the
releases page.
Run middleclick-autoscroll disable before removing the package — it undoes
everything.
How it works
Blink (the engine in Chromium, Electron, and CEF) already has autoscroll, but it's off on Linux because middle click does primary-selection paste there. One flag turns it on:
--enable-blink-features=MiddleClickAutoscroll
Doing that for one app is a five-minute job. Doing it for all of them — across flag files, desktop entries, Flatpaks, snaps, autostart entries, Steam — so it survives upgrades, is not. That's what this does.
New apps are picked up within a second by a systemd path unit that watches the
relevant directories. Without systemd, middleclick-autoscroll apply does the
same thing manually.
Steam
Steam's web UI supports autoscroll but has no way to pass extra arguments to its helper, so the program patches the script that starts it. Steam checks its own files at every start and repairs whatever looks changed, so the patch is written to look unchanged: the bytes the argument costs come back out of the script's comments and the timestamp is restored, leaving a file exactly as long and as old as Steam left it. It survives however you start Steam — the menu, a desktop shortcut, a game launcher, a terminal.
As a fallback, for the case where that isn't possible, -noverifyfiles goes on
everything that starts Steam: its launcher, its autostart entry, and the
shortcuts it writes for single games. That one means Steam won't auto-repair
damaged files on its own — you can turn it off separately in the settings.
Commands
| Command | |
|---|---|
middleclick-autoscroll |
Interactive menu |
… enable |
Turn on, apply, start watching |
… disable |
Undo everything |
… apply |
Apply to new apps |
… apply --rebuild |
Redo from scratch |
… status |
What's covered |
… list |
All apps and how they're handled |
See man middleclick-autoscroll for more.
Building from source
make
sudo make install
Optionally needs msgfmt (gettext) for translations and scdoc for the man
page. Supports PREFIX and DESTDIR. make check runs syntax checks and
shellcheck.
See packaging/README.md for release builds and repo signing.
License
GPL-3.0-or-later.