"Massively" slow down the mouse -- Ubuntu 14.04

[Karl Auer]

On Wed, 2017-01-25 at 15:43 -0500, Robert Heller wrote:
> I have a user who wants to slow the mouse down slower than the
> slowest setting in the preferences.  Is this possible?  Her problem
> is she is not able to *precisely* position the mouse when editing
> text.  And no, she does not want to use the keyboard to position the
> cursor.  Is there something she (or I as the admistrator) can do?

Clean the mouse underneath. Sometimes inaccuracy is due to hair, dust
and grime mucking with the opticals underneath.

Try some different mousing surfaces. Inaccurate mousing is often a
symptom of a surface that is hostile to optical mice.

If that doesn't work, try some different mice. At very least that will
exclude a faulty mouse as the cause. Also, mice send data at different
rates depending on their resolution. They are relative beasts - they
indicate how far they have moved in a quantum called a "mickey"; they
don't (unless they have special drivers) send absolute position. The
higher resolution a mouse is, the more updates it will send as it moves
and the smaller a "mickey" is.

A lo-tech solution would be to increase the text size to the point that
the inaccuracy is less noticeable.

If the issue is a physical disability on your user's part, you might
also want to try alternative pointers, such as tablets, touchpads,
trackpoints, trackballs and joysticks.

If it has to be a mouse and none of the above are workable solutions,
see if you can get someone to tweak the mouse driver. The source code
is open and free :-) That would be a very useful tweak for a great many
people, I suspect.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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