Ages ago, in my own editor (and missing HP chipmunk physical "paddle wheel" scrolling), I implemented the following mouse scrolling scheme:
- Integrate the area* enclosed by recent mouse movement
- Ignore everything under a threshold (this is normal, straight-line, mousing)
- Scroll according to the sign of the area.
. naively this would be slow scroll for small circles; fast for large
. but I found it more intuitive to reverse the action:
the bigger the gesture, the more controlled the scroll
(probably closer to scroll-by-radian than scroll-by-area)
It looks like I could use this package to do something similar, only system-wide and portably, but I mention it here as it's the sort of project I'm extremely unlikely to Get Around To (and would therefore be chuffed if someone else were to!)
Both Synaptics and ELAN drivers offered circular/chiral scrolling, but it seems this option is not prominently featured (or maybe unavailable) in Windows 10 and above.
IIRC the gesture starts at the edge of the trackpad much like regular edge scrolling, but then you can extend the motion to the entire working area of the trackpad, pretending to spin an imaginary jog wheel.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planimeter