Every once in a while I surprise myself with the discovery of something so simple it makes you think “Why didn’t I know this already? And why haven’t I been told?”

Along the same theme as the first time I learnt that you could tab upwards, I was watching an apple.com trailer today when completely by accident I discovered something so simple yet so useful one would think I had just learnt how to operate a mouse for the first time.

Did you know that when watching a movie in MPlayer, if you use your mouse’s scroll-wheel over the video window the movie skips forward and backward? Who would’ve thunk it?

Now, being a somewhat-seasoned campaigner in all that is Linux, such a discovery was both exciting and embarassing. Here I am spending a decent part of my day writing bash scripts and PHP, and yet I didn’t know you could scroll freaking back and forward through a movie with little more than a wheel mouse.

For the non-linux people out there, I am not sure if similar functionality exists in *insert favourite media player here*, but give it a go.

As a sub-script, for those of you using linux but thinking “Hey, I have a wheel mouse, but it doesn’t scroll”, add the following line under Section "InputDevice" in your XF86Config/xorg.conf:

Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

Simply restart the X server and scroll till ye can scroll no more.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 6:38 pm and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.