Shortly after switching from OSX, I noticed that I would get unexpected (and extremely annoying) zooming after changing tabs in Chrome.
After a while, it became apparent that it only happened when I had scrolled up or down just before changing tabs with Ctrl Up/Down.
In other words, the steps to reproduce were:
- scroll a bit in tab A (the faster the scroll, the longer the coast)
- while tab A is still coasting, change tabs to tab B
The result is if you had pressed ctrl+= or ctrl+- a bunch of times.
After fooling around with xinput, xev, xserver-xorg-input-synaptics, xorg.conf, etc, I realized the scrolling/coasting action was being interpreted as keypresses even after changing contexts.
The solution:
$ sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
This package provides synclient, a commandline utility to query and modify Synaptics driver options.
The culprit was the default settings for the Synaptics touchpad:
$ synclient -l | grep -i coast
CornerCoasting = 0
CoastingSpeed = 20
CoastingFriction = 50
I played with the settings until I found a combination that allowed a reasonable amount of coasting.
Changing CoastingSpeed to 0 disabled the smooth scrolling effect-thing completely. Any value higher than 0, and the behavior was still present.
Increasing CoastingFriction to 255 slowed down the scrolling effect enough so that the coasting would stop before I could change tabs.
TL;DR
Install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics and add the following lines to your profile:
CoastingSpeed = 10
CoastingFriction = 255
Ahh, much better.
o/
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