Horizontal Scroll with mouse wheel.

[rowanmoor]

Many modern mice have wheels that scroll horizontally as well as vertically (either by leaning the main wheel left/right, or with a second wheel somewhere). PL/SQL Developer doesn't seem to support this at the moment. It is one of only a couple of applications I use that doesn't support it.

Am I missing a setting or is this something that explicitly needs supporting in PL/SQL Developer?

 

[Marco Kalter]

I think this should be transparent to the application. The mouse software/driver will send scroll event messages to the application or control when the mouse wheel is used.

 

[rowanmoor]

It doesn't seem to be completely transparent. Most applications just work with it, but there are a few specific ones that don't. Excel is known to be a problem and not support it unless a mouse driver overrides the standard windows messages. The other application I use that it doesn't work on is VB6 - but that doesn't support vertical scrolling either without an addin.

I have tried using AHC (AutoHotKey) to specifically send the left/right scroll event messages to PL/SQL Developer and it does nothing whereas all other applications (except VB6 and Excel) scroll horizontally as expected.

 

[Ameen]

It is transparent to the application, I am using A4tech mouse with 2 wheels and it works fine for me. Search for the right driver for your mouse, disable (office mode) or its equivalent if it is active.

 

[Hilarion]

As Ameen described, it should work transparently for the application, by sending proper Windows messages.

Maybe you have a mouse that has a "leaning wheel" that is not intended as horizontal scroll, but as two additional mouse buttons (maybe "back" and "forward" - those are often present on mouses to allow faster web browsing). You may try to look through your mouse driver/software settings to see if it can be set up to emulate the horizontal scroll.

 

[mobailey]

I can replicate this problem raise by rowanmoor.

My mouse settings in Control Panel includes a tab for "Wheel". This includes the following setting for Horizontal Scrolling: "Tilt the wheel to scroll the following number of characters at a time"; this is set to the default of 3.

In Notepad, IE, etc. I can scroll horizontally by tilting the mouse wheel.

But, in PL/SQL Developer, titling the mouse wheel does nothing. (Even with a long line of text / resized window.)

Not a big problem for me, as I never knew the ability to sideways scroll like this existed until now.

-MB

 

[rowanmoor]

The mouse I have is a Logitech G702 and it doesn't need any drivers to do horizontal scrolling. In fact it doesn't need any drivers at all - it has a processor and memory and once programmed acts as a completely standard HID device and just passes the relevant keystrokes/events to windows.

That could be the difference. Those for whom it does work are probably using fancy mouse drivers which force horizontal scrolling using methods other than a simple WM_HSCROLL event. On another PC I have a logitech mouse with all the drivers installed and they are pre-setup with a whole load of program specific behaviours to get various buttons working including specific handling for horizontal scroll in Excel. With that driver, Horizontal (and vertical) scroll works in many applications that specifically do not support it like VB6.

Unfortunately the PC that I run PL/SQL developer on is locked down so I cannot install new drivers on it.

However I have currently got horizontal scrolling working by hacking the same utility I use to get scrolling to work in VB6 so that when it detects a PL/SQL developer window it translates WM_MOUSEHWHEEL into WM_HSCROLL events aimed directly at the edit control rather than the application. That seems to work, but is not an ideal solution as it has to be coded to each window type.