What is it?

The following is a patch for slipwheelin', the ability to scroll a window without rolling the mouse wheel. To try it, patch your RXVT source and start RXVT. Push Ctrl then move your wheel up or down by a notch. The scrollbar will start to move and will remain in motion as long as Ctrl is pressed. If you move the wheel more, the scroll bar will go faster. Releasing the ctrl key will stop scrolling and set the velocity of the thumb back to zero.

Furthermore, you can get the same functionality by pressing Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down. When you release Ctrl, scrolling stops. Push Ctrl+Up or Ctrl+Down several times to increase the rate of scrolling in either direction.

As a bonus, this patch also fixes some portability issues on OSF and IRIX.

How do I get it?

Here's the patch. To apply it, go to your rxvt source tree (i assume it's called rxvt-2.7.5), and type

patch -p1 < slipwheeling.patch

If your rxvt source directory is not called rxvt-2.7.5, you will have to fiddle with the -p or -d options of patch.

Or you can download my source for my hacked version of RXVT 2.7.5. Build using

./configure --enable-everything --enable-xgetdefault --enable-slipwheeling --enable-mousewheel.

Ali Rahimi

Last modified: Mon Feb 12 15:13:34 EST 2001