How to Enable ThinkPad Trackpoint Scrolling

I use a Lenovo ThinkPad R61 laptop and one of the many things I love about it is the trackpoint, also called the nub, pointing stick or nipple mouse.

If your Lenovo or IBM laptop has this feature and you’re not using it, you’re missing out on a better laptop experience. The trackpoint is a more accurate pointing device and also definitely more ergonomical to use than the inferior trackpad most people are accustomed to nowadays. If you have a different brand of laptop however, your mileage may vary. My old Dell laptop’s nub, for instance, wasn’t very good. It had the classic dome type so maybe I just prefer the newer soft dome type.

But Lenovo pretty much has the best implementation of this pointing device technology.

The Scrolling Problem

We scroll a lot on many computer programs. Web browsers, text editors, music players, etc. In my case, one of them is NetBeans, a programmer’s software.

I’ve been using NetBeans for a long time but I was sorely disappointed to find that the trackpoint didn’t work in it. I endured months of using the scrollbar until one day I told myself that there must be a way to fix this and make the trackpoint work here. Thankfully, Google gave a few helpful links.

Now I can use the trackpoint on any program where (for some unknown reason) it natively doesn’t work. I thought of rewriting the steps in an easy-to-follow guide. This should serve as a reference for myself too, if ever I need to reinstall Windows on my laptop.

Turn ON the Trackpoint for Certain Programs

Go to the following folder: C:\Program Files\Synaptics\SynTP

Open the following file in a text editor: TP4table.dat
Right click on it and select “Open with…” then choose your text editor. Notepad will do.

Note: If you are on Windows Vista or Windows 7 and you have UAC (User Account Control) enabled, you will need to open this file as an administrator. Do this by right-clicking the text editor program and choosing “Run as administrator”. Open the TP4table.dat file from inside the text editor.

Once you have the file open, look for the “Pass 1 rules” in it. We’ll be adding lines to the end of this section. The last line here should be just right before the AutoScrollTable part.

We’ll be adding rules using the following format:

; Program Name
*,*,ProgramName.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

The text in bold are the only ones you need to change. As an example, here are the lines I added to my own TP4table.dat file:

; Safari
*,*,safari.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

; NetBeans
*,*,netbeans.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

; Mixero
*,*,mixero.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

; Windows Live Writer
*,*,WindowsLiveWriter.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

; WriteMonkey
*,*,WriteMonkey.exe,*,*,*,WheelStd,1,9

Just follow the pattern for adding other programs. The first line with the semicolon is just a comment to indicate what program the following rule is for.

If you’re not sure of the program’s filename, open up the Task Manager while the program is running and look for its name under the Processes tab.

When you’re done, save the file and restart the computer for the changes to take effect.

It’s a hassle to do a restart especially for me because I just hibernate the laptop. But I haven’t found a way yet to make Windows reread the newly-edited Synaptics configuration files, if that’s even possible. But this would do for now.

Well, that’s it. Happy scrolling!