A Tip, Or Two...: Scroll wheel equivalent (mouse wheel emulation) on Synaptics TouchPad

In case you have a Windows laptop with Synaptics touchpad, and you are not using mouse, chances are you've stumbled upon the following little annoyance: In some applications, actions mapped to mouse's scrolling wheel can't be triggered by touchpad. I'll use the example of Foobar2000, but there are many programs suffering from the same incompatibility with Synaptics TouchPad at its default settings. In this post I will present a simple workaround, which anables a proper emulation of mouse wheel, at the cost of software not changing the cursor into scrolling indicator anymore. Personally, I hardly consider this a lost of functionality, as I really don't think I need an indicator to tell me I'm scrolling a page. Doh!

With Synaptics' device, there are two methods of scrolling. You can either make use of side zone, or go for multi-finger gestures and two-finger scrolling. As side zone is there to emulate grabbing the scrollbar's thumb with your mouse, we'll have to use the second method. First we need to make sure Synaptics software is installed. Workaround was tested using software version 15.2.20 (drivers page) on Windows 7 64bit, but it should work on Windows 8 as well.

Next go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Mouse...

... ->Device Settings -> Settings, and enable MultiFinger Gestures and then Two-Finger Scrolling on Synaptics TouchPad:

Enabling MultiFinger Gestures and Two-Finger Scrolling in Synaptics Touchpad Properties

Now, as I've mentioned before, I'll use an example of Foobar2000. In this popular audio player, there is a feature in Facets UI element, where you can place a mouse cursor over a displayed album art, press & hold the Ctrl key, and change image size by turning mouse wheel. If you try to do this with two-finger scrolling on touchpad, regular mouse pointer is changing into Move cross, and there is no resizing taking place:

If trying to scroll without holding Ctrl key, pointer is changing to scrolling indicator. Again, no resizing whatsoever:

In order to change that behavior, we need to modify Synaptics registry settings, by adding a new value to Windows registry. Run regedit.exe in order to open registry, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh and add a new DWORD (value's data will be set to 0) named UseScrollCursor. It should look like this:

Adding new value to Synaptics registry settings

Alternatively, download .reg file I've uploaded here, containing following code:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh]
"UseScrollCursor"=dword:00000000

Double-click it in order to merge into Windows registry (when asked, click "yes" - twice).

Finally, we need to restart Synaptics process (SynTPEnh.exe). Open Task Manager, locate and terminate the process, and then start it again from within the task manager (need to provide correct path to executable), or locate the file (usually in C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP\ ) and execute it. Again, you can just download .bat file from here, and double-click it. Here's the contents of the file:

@echo off
taskkill /f /im SynTPEnh.exe
start \Progra~1\Synaptics\SynTP\SynTPEnh.exe

That's it, now the two-finger scrolling perfectly emulates mouse wheel. If, at any time, you want your scrolling indicators back, you may change the newly created value's data to 1, or just delete it.
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P.K.

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