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I'm left handed, and on most linux distros (and desktop envs) it's really easy to just swap the buttons in the GUI settings manager. I just switched to dwm on manjaro, which is only a window manager, so there's no gui settings manager. How do I swap the left and right mouse buttons?

Thanks for any help you can provide!

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    You should check answers here already - https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/284703/script-for-swapping-mouse-primary-and-secondary-buttons – tukan May 27 '20 at 19:03

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I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed with KDE Plasma 5.21 rather than Manjaro with dwm, but both use xorg so this advice might help you.

openSUSE does have a nice GUI which lets you simply toggle the mouse from right-hand to left-hand, but that's of no interest to me because I have a standard mouse on my right and a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball on my left, and I want each to work correctly without constantly toggling the settings. So I dug around and found advice about creating an xorg.conf file just for the trackball, to remap its buttons.

Eventually I ended up with this, which I used to create a file called kensington-expert-trackball.conf:

# Configure left-handed button arrangement for the Kensington Expert trackball
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Kensington Expert Trackball left handed mapping"
    Driver "evdev"
    MatchProduct "Kensington Expert Mouse"
    Option "ButtonMapping" "3 8 1 4 5 0 0 2 0"
    Option "AccelerationProfile" "0"
    Option "AccelerationScheme" "predictable"
    Option "AccelerationNumerator" "3"
EndSection

This works for me to reverse the primary action ("left-click") and secondary action ("right-click") buttons, and swaps the additional top two buttons which the Kensington Expert Mouse has, and maintains the same scroll direction on the wheel (but you can swap 4 and 5 if you wanted to reverse that for any reason).

In openSUSE it's then necessary to place this file into the /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory and reboot in order for it to take effect. Manjaro/Arch may use a different directory path for its xorg.conf files, so you'll have to do some reading to check on that.

You'll also need to do your own digging to work out what to use for the "MatchProduct" line in order to match your specific mouse device, and whether it supports the needed evdev driver options. See this older question for some advice about that.

As always, backup your system before you make any changes like this.

Once you've got your xorg.conf setup the way you want, you should be able to have your mouse behave how you like, even if your window system doesn't provide an interface with the options you want.

Arkanon
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