Enable natural scrolling configuration.nix

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1

I have been trying to get natural scrolling to work but the services.xserver.libinput.naturalScrolling seems to have no effect.

How does one enable natural scrolling?

2

Unfortunately not all desktop environments will pick this setting up. In particular in Gnome you might need to set this manually:

dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/natural-scroll true
dconf write /org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/mouse/natural-scroll true
3

Hi @hedning, it’s been five years but I’m new to Linux as a whole and would appreciate some more details. How might I update configuration.nix to run this automatically on startup? Or does it still have to be manually set for each PC? Thanks

4

Hello, and welcome! dconf settings can be declared in config. These links might help:

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5

Thanks @dtannock, super helpful. Just curious, do these changes still need flakes or is that a relic of 2022? Being new to Linux, I went with the standard NixOS + GNOME setup, I know flakes is experimental so I’d like to avoid it if I can

6

Got it working without flakes!

  1. Install Home Manager
  2. Update configuration.nix:
# /etc/nixos/configuration.nix
{ config, pkgs, ... }:

{
  imports =
    [ # Include the results of the hardware scan.
      ./hardware-configuration.nix
      <home-manager/nixos>
    ];

  # ...

  users.users.markw = {
    isNormalUser = true;
    description = "Mark Wiemer";
    extraGroups = [ "networkmanager" "wheel" ];
    packages = with pkgs; [
      # thunderbird
    ];
  };

  home-manager.users.markw = { pkgs, ... }: {  
      # The state version is required and should stay at the version you
      # originally installed.
      home.stateVersion = "24.11"; # had to put this at the top for some reason
      dconf.settings = {
        "org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/mouse" = { natural-scroll = true; };
        "org/gnome/desktop/interface" = {
          color-scheme = "prefer-dark";
      };
    };
  };
  1. sudo nixos-rebuild switch

:slight_smile:

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