Middle mouse button scrolling not working

[csicky]

• VSCode Version: 1.47.3
• OS Version: Windows 10

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Click with the scroll wheel in the code editor
2. Drag the mouse

Expected outcome: window scrolls
What happens instead: some kind of unnecessary highlighting

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

If you notice some familiarity with this issue, is because there is a neglected issue opened 4(FOUR) years ago without any attempt at fixing. And before stamping feature request on this, it is a BUG.

[lszomoru]

/gifPlease

[csicky]

/nogifforsomethingcommonsense

[csicky]

It is a bug not a feature request.

[gillminister]

@lszomoru @vscode-triage-bot here's a screen recording, in case anyone is genuinely confused

[trbot86]

Voted (immediately as soon as this post was created)... This would be very helpful to me...

[SetTrend]

We have more than 20 upvotes on this issue now. Just like with this issue.

What is the further process of this improvement request? Is the "20 upvotes limit" just a mirage?

[BihtSift]

FWIW, I wouldn't call this a bug. It's definitely a feature request. The current functionality appears to be modeled after Sublime's multi-line selection, or column selection (this is different than "block selection") which shouldn't be removed.

Even visual studio doesn't have middle mouse scrolling out of the box (many extensions add this feature).

What I recommend is an option for the middle mouse scroll behavior (multi-select being default). Since there is a keyboard shortcut for multi-line select, users like myself can get the best of both worlds.

[csicky]

Imagine there is a software which decides to do the click on right button and right click on left button of the mouse. It is not a "bug", it is a decision of the software makers. What would people do? Open bug reports. Mouse does not behave as expected.

A standard mouse has left button for click, right button for right click, and a scroll wheel for scrolling. The scroll wheel when pressed is the middle button. Middle button's standard use is auto scrolling.

We can argue that it is not a bug, it is a decision of developers to hijack the middle button for something else, but in that case the only sensible thing to do is to provide a checkbox to let it work as expected. The middle button was already doing something (auto scroll) before VS Code just hijacked it without notifying users about it.