Problems with Pointer/Mouse events on Macs

Hi all, first time posting here so nice to meet you all :slight_smile:

I am working on debugging a strange inconsistency with the Pointer/Mouse events in RV. Basically, I want to use scroll with my mouse scrollwheel as a hotkey. While this hotkey works with Windows/Linux, it doesn’t work properly with Macs. On the Mac, it works only when scrolling on the touchpad (say on a Macbook), but not with an external mouse’s scrollwheel. For my purposes I am trying to use the “pointer–shift–wheeldown” and the “pointer–shift–wheelup” events.

Has anyone run into this type of issue before? Or does anyone have any insight as to why this may be happening? Perhaps I should be using a different event? Or maybe there is some small discrepancy between the way the Mac OS registers touchpad and scrollwheel inputs?

Any ideas would be appreciated, thank you in advance!

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Hi Cjlee,

Thanks for posting, it is great to have you here.

One trick you can do is to launch RV from the terminal with -debug events. On OSX, that would look like:

/Applications/RV.app/Contents/MacOS/RV -debug events

That should spit out all the events and what they are handled with. I plugged in my trusty Logitech mouse to try this out and these are the events I got:

Event: pointer–shift–wheeldown from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (391/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheeldown from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (391/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheeldown from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (391/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheeldown from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (391/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–move from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (391,264)
Event: pointer–shift–wheelup from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheelup from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheelup from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheelup from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)
Event: pointer–shift–wheelup from RV Main Window/0x7fd75e186cc0 [Shift] (390/1024,264/576) start: (318,145)

If you run RV in that mode, do you get any output with your mouse?

-Kessler

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Hi Michael, thanks for your reply, that -debug events flag is super helpful and I’ll make sure to remember it in the future!

Unfortunately when I tried with my own Logitech mouse on my Macbook, I found that shift+scrolling would not trigger any events, although regular scrolling and all other actions did. I did some digging and found that MacOS has a (rather unadvertised) feature where using an external mouse’s scrollwheel with the shift key actually scrolls horizontally. And it appears that RV doesn’t have any events to handle this horizontal scroll action.

The reason the event works when shift+scrolling with the touchpad is because the touchpad has no such function, since after all you can just move your fingers side to side on the touchpad to horizontal scroll. So shift+scrolling on the touchpad is just registered as a regular scroll.

I’m quite stumped by this problem, as this function is for a variety of users, some of whom will be using iMac desktops which have no touchpad…

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Wow, that’s strange! Do you know where that feature is controlled? My event stream was from shift + external mouse.

I am, however on MacOS Mojave.

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Oh interesting, I’m on MacOS Mojave too! I couldn’t find any relevant settings for the horizontal scrolling, from the info I found online I thought it was just like a built-in thing… I also tried with a wired mouse and a wireless mouse with the USB dongle. Hmm…

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Are you running on a macbook or a machine without a touchpad. I wonder if the behavior changes if there’s no touchpad. I’m running on a MacBook Pro

I do get the horizontal scrolling in apps, but RV seems to pick up the native events that Qt is getting on my system.

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I’m also on a Macbook Pro, and I’ve heard this problem also reported by one of my users who uses an iMac desktop which doesn’t have a built-in touchpad.

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