UPDATE: It’s a physical/hardware issue. I did some more plugging and unplugging and tried the live disk. It’s my wireless keyboard and mouse. I’m still not sure what the cause is since they were running fine.

At some point in October or early November, my Cinnamon desktop started acting up.

Whenever I press the “Ctrl” key on the laptop keyboard or the Bluetooth one, it starts zooming in, if the program has that capacity. For example, it does it in LibreOffice and Firefox but not Terminal or Nicotine+.

I checked the keyboard shortcuts and bindings but I didn’t see any issues there.

At the same time, the mouse/trackpad is misbehaving. This is much more frustrating because it’s inconsistent and challenging to recreate.

The easiest example to use is Nicotine+. When I click on a tab, it scrolls through the previous tabs until it gets to the main one.

It won’t happen in other programs with tabbed screens, but I’ll get a similar behavior in some drop-down boxes or using autofill - the list won’t remain open. I’ll click to open and it opens for a split second.

I don’t have a ton of additional programs and I don’t get into the nuts and bolts - I only run the recommended updates. I don’t know of anything that changed.

I have a Debian USB ready to go in case I can’t get anywhere with this. I’m also posting this in a couple of Mint forums.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    6·
    6 days ago

    If you run xev in a virtual terninal program — this works on Wayland as well, though make sure that the xev window has focus — you can see what actual events the program is getting when you’re doing stuff like pressing Control.

  • anamethatisnt@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    Does the error occur when you use the live usb environment? (helps verify if its hw or sw that’s the culprit)

  • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
    5·
    7 days ago

    UPDATE: It’s a physical/hardware issue. I did some more plugging and unplugging and tried the live disk. It’s my wireless keyboard and mouse. I’m still not sure what the cause is since they were running fine.

    Make sure you don’t have another input device you’ve forgotten about, like another wireless keyboard or mouse in a drawer, or a game controller. If they’re on and connected, they might be sending input.

    Ctrl+Scroll wheel is a common zoom in/out hotkey. It sounds like you’re getting bad scroll wheel input. If there are no other external devices, check the wireless mouse. Turn it off and back on, replace the battery, and clean the scroll wheel (internally, too, if you can). If it still doesn’t work, replace it.

    • harrys_balzac@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      3·
      7 days ago

      I swapped the kb & mouse out. Everything seems okay. I’ll dig into them later to see if I can find out what’s wrong. They’re both charged and neither had been dropped, so maybe something got in them.