I'm using Debian 12 from a fresh install (with Wayland). The mouse I'm using is an Azeron Cyro keypad. Azeron does not offer configuration software for Linux, but the device has onboard memory and can be configured via Windows or windows emulator. Importantly, what I'm trying to achieve here is not possible on Windows using Azeron's software.
My goal is to use one of the 16 keypad buttons on the mouse to disable mouse movement while pressed, resuming mouse movement when released. This is how I currently use the mouse in Windows so that I do not have to lift the mouse to reposition it. I'm able to achieve using reWASD on Windows, but they also do not offer a Linux version of their software.
I've tried a few different solutions, but I haven't been able to find something that fits this need, so I'm hoping someone might be able to guide me in a better direction:
- AntiMicroX - I've tried using the Flatpak, AppImage, and .deb packages. The software works as expected on other devices (for example, an xbox controller), and while my mouse shows up as a device, the button remapping does not work, the thumb stick is not available for calibration, and there seems to be no access to the mouse sensor.
- Input-Remapper - Very similar results to AntiMicroX, and also, I don't see a way to use Input-Remapper to disable mouse input anyway.
- Mouseless - While I can generate mouse movement commands through Mouseless, I haven't been able to disable mouse movement from my physical mouse.
- evdevremapkeys - This has been my most successful tool. With the debugger, I'm able to see my key presses (unless I have the key unmapped on the mouse) and I'm able to remap existing keys with a yaml configuration, but I've still not found a way to disable the mouse input.
I found something that seemed close to what I need in a two year old reddit post which mentions that it's possible with Sway (via man sway-input). I don't understand the proposed solution though and I'm not very familiar with compositors, how to interact with them or how installing one would affect my OS environment...
Does anyone know of a way I might be able to achieve this?
Success! This is certainly a niche issue, but since it's taken a pretty lengthy amount of research to resolve, I thought I'd add some resources here in case it's helpful to anyone else.
After exploring others' recommendations, I've saved hardware solutions for tinkering in the future and was also not able to find a way to temporarily disable mouse movement through gnome. I finally landed on python-evdev as my solution. With this, you can read input from one or more devices simultaneously, create a virtual input device to write events to on-demand, and (maybe most importantly) retain exclusive access to the original hardware devices to absorb their input. I'll also shout out evsieve which lead me to python-evdev. The python-evdev documentation is quite thorough, and it's quite a custom solution based on your own needs, so I'm not going to go into great detail on my python script - but it's only 27 lines long, nothing major.
Be aware that you may need to write some udev rules to allow access to the physical devices and to allow the virtual device to be created. This was the easiest part for me to find help with, so I'll leave some abridged copy/paste details below:
Find your device Vendor and Product IDs
cat /proc/bus/input/devices | moreWrite a udev rule (I used priority 71) to allow access to the device:
SUBSYSTEMS=="usb", ATTRS{idVendor}=="", ATTRS{idProduct}=="", TAG+="uaccess"Add a very poor udev rule to allow a virtual device to be created by python-evdev (there's probably a much better way to do this):
KERNEL=="uinput", SUBSYSTEM=="misc", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660"