Occasional Thoughts

Once again I cover an application for Microsoft Windows in this App of the Whatever post. Not that anybody starts to think that I became a big Windows fan - no, I'm not. It's just that I am missing a lot of features under Windows I got used to on my KDE/Linux box. Ever since I have to use Windows I was missing one little thing very badly. To use the mouse wheel on an application you have to click on it first to give it the focus. Even worse is that you first have to click in the left pane of the explorer to scroll the folder tree and once again in the right pane to scroll the files view.
On KDE (and probably Gnome, too) you don't have to focus a window or pane first to use the mouse button. You simply move the mouse pointer over it and turn the scroll wheel - no need to waste a click - no need to focus the window - no need to bring the window to front and cover other windows. Thanks to the german c't magazine I finally found the solution: KatMouse. This little utility just solves my problem. You also can configure it to put a window behind others on middle click, but I need my middle mouse button for cygwin. Now I am still desperately looking for a X-Window like Middle-Mouse-Copy-and-Paste utility.