Point me to dummy guide for input devices?

I’d like the input behavior of my Linux PC laptop to be more closely aligned with my MacBook. I occasionally use an external keyboard and trackpad with both. I’m using KDE Plasma as my GUI.

Trackpads

  1. The trackpad behavior is mostly okay, except that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get natural scrolling on my external trackpad (Apple Magic Trackpad). Works fine on the laptop’s built-in trackpad. How to I single out the external trackpad and alter its scrolling behavior?

  2. Minor issue is how to disable three-finger touch pasting (I think 3-finger = middle button click?).

Keyboards

1.) On macOS it’s super easy to add accented letters using the option key. How do I get that in Linux?

2.) I want to fix my clipboard shortcuts to use the key immediately left of the spacebar universally (e.g. [button]+[c] to copy, [button] + [v] to paste, [button] + [a] to select all). In Konsole the clipboard commands inject a “shift” key (I guess to distinguish copying from interrupting) and it drives me nuts every time.

On my MacBook, the bottom left keys are [fn], [control], [option], [command], [spacebar].

On my PC Laptop, they are [control], [fn], [windows], [alt], [spacebar]. For my use case these should be remapped as [fn], [control], [alt], [windows], [spacebar], but only remapped on the built-in keyboard NOT on my external keyboard.

On my external keyboard (logitech MX Keys) they are [control], [option], [command], [spacebar]
I use this external keyboard with both mac & linux.


I’m hoping there is some beginner friendly guide, walkthrough, or video for this.

There is no dummy guide - because - generally speaking - Linux is not for dummies - :slight_smile:

While macOS - in the *nix sense - is a close relative to Linux - the keyboard modifiers are slightly different - they are not direcly translatable to a pc equivalent.

The next best thing you can do is to select a mac keyboard layout - and hope for the best - test which one comes close enough.

I suggest you search the mother wiki - wiki.archlinux.org - for keyboard layout customization - but as noted - and I assume you are likely not as inexperienced as you initially let on - still it requires some persistance and exprimentation to get what you would prefer.

KDE settings for Mouse should have an option for Reverse scroll direction

@nikgnomic - The KDE Touchpad settings for inverting scroll direction correctly provide the natural scrolling for the built-in touchpad. However neither the Touchpad scroll setting nor Mouse scroll setting has any affect on the external (bluetooth) touchpad.

Hi, I have an Apple bluetooth Touchpad from 2010. I fixed an issue for natural scrolling that didn’t apply every time I reconnected on KDE Plasma. I did like this:

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf

inside I have inserted the following configuration:

Section “InputClass”
Identifier “Trackpad of Name Last Name”
MatchProduct “Trackpad of Name Last Name”
Driver “libinput”
Option “NaturalScrolling” “on”
MatchIsTouchpad “on”
Option “Tapping” “on”
EndSection

You can see what your device is named with the following command:

libinput list-devices

Thanks to actubal