mjhjmtu

I'm trying left handed mousing, and I want to be able to easily switch between right handed mode and left handed mode. There is a utility for Windows called SwapMouseButtons that allows to bind a key for that switch - both swapping the buttons and changing the pointer's direction.

I would like to do something similar for KDE in a shell script.

Swapping the buttons is easy with xinput, but I'm having a hard time changing the mouse theme to a left handed theme from the command line. I also prefer to find a KDE solution for the button swapping, as changes made via xinput are session-bound and KDE settings are saved. I wouldn't like to have a left handed theme with right handed buttons after a reset...

The problem is, I can't find much documentation on KDE's command line utilities. I found this post that suggests using kapplymousetheme, which seems promising, but I can't figure out how to use it(no man page, no --help flag...)

I've also found that kcmshell4 cursortheme opens the mouse theme dialog, and that kcmshell4 accepts the --args flag for sending arguments to the module, but I couldn't find nor figure out what arguments I need to send to just change the mouse theme without opening the dialog(if that's even supported).

I should also note that I want these changes to take effect immediately. Changing a configuration file and having to restart the system(or even just X or KDM) won't do, though if I can reload that configuration file(with a command line utility, of course) so that the changes will take effect immediately that will be fine.

Thanks in advance!

Two years late but I just re-solved this for Plasma 5. Maybe this will help the next person who comes along for this answer.

Here is a KDE method I use for swapping the mouse buttons around. Maybe the same thinking can be applied to altering the theme too.

Essentially, all you have to do is change MouseButtonMapping in $HOME/.config/kcminputrc between LeftHanded and RightHanded and then call kcminit mouse. Here is a script to do just this:

#!/bin/bash

CONFIG=$HOME/.config/kcminputrc
CURRENT=`kreadconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key MouseButtonMapping`

if [ $CURRENT = "LeftHanded" ]; then
 kwriteconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key MouseButtonMapping RightHanded
elif [ $CURRENT = "RightHanded" ]; then
 kwriteconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key MouseButtonMapping LeftHanded
fi

kcminit mouse

Note that the file in KDE Plasma 4 is $HOME/.kde/share/config/kcminputrc and in Plasma 5 it is $HOME/.config/kcminputrc so you may have to edit the script to suit.

I then add this script to my main KDE apps menu so that I can assign a global hotkey for it.

UPDATE 2018:

Due to KDE config file changes the script now looks like this:

#!/bin/bash

CONFIG=$HOME/.config/kcminputrc
CURRENT=`kreadconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key XLbInptLeftHanded`

if [ $CURRENT = "true" ]; then
 kwriteconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key XLbInptLeftHanded false
elif [ $CURRENT = "false" ]; then
 kwriteconfig --file $CONFIG --group Mouse --key XLbInptLeftHanded true
fi

kcminit mouse

You can easily change to left-handed as follows:

 xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1"

You can find the documentation on https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MouseCustomizations