Call me ‘delicate’, but I’m not so keen on painful swollen fingers and hurty-squinty eyes. Thus I went in search of a way to bypass the thin dark scrollbars in Poser 11 and DAZ Studio. Of course you can always ignore them and click into a panel/window to get ‘focus’ on it, then scroll and scroll again using a central mouse wheel and big twisty finger-movements. That’s not ideal, and such clunkiness is compounded by mouse-wheels that tend to become gunked up and anything but free-wheeling.

But imagine you could just hover your mouse over a Library window pane in either DAZ or Poser, auto-focusing the mouse into that window. Then with a single ‘right-click and hold’ (anywhere) start elegantly scrolling the window’s contents down or up. With the scrolling all then under the control of very subtle mouse movements. No need to shift focus to a different Library pane, by first clicking inside it. No need to then scrollwheel and scrollwheel again and again to get down a long list.

There’s a surprising lack of Windows helper software to do this. Some of the functionality is built into modern mice, but while they sort-of work well on browsers they can’t do what I describe above. Nor can they distinguish between different Library panels in DAZ and Poser. Is there software that can? Well, Google Code has kept the old abandonware MoScroll_0_7 beta around, but I found it very basic and so far as I can tell no longer does anything at all after install.

The best option that can is the equally old Windows abandonware called Pointix Scroll++ 2.02. Basically its unique function can be summed up as “right-click anywhere to smoothly scroll, under the control of subtle mouse-movements”, and it can handle focusing into subtly-different Library panels with ease. This software has now turned up at at WinFiles Mouse and Keyboard Utilities. There is also a slightly different copy of 2.02 on Archive.org in an old cover-disc bundle of freebies and shareware titled ‘(Czech) PC World 1999-06 CD-ROM.’ Yes, it’s that old. But… like many old bits of Windows shareware it still works fine!

After getting it (ideally from WinFiles, which is what worked for me) you then visit Carlton Bale’s page “How to Scroll if Your Mouse has No Scroll Wheel”. There he has the Netplaque and zeroes you need to enable this old abandonware. He also offers some useful settings screenshots. Tested and working for me on the WinFiles download of v.2.02. He also hosts an archive of the slightly more advanced 2.05 version, but so far as I can tell neither his Netplaque or regfix work on that.

So… 2.02 is still working fine, is stable and doing a lovely job (though I can’t vouch for it on Windows 10). Version 2.02 may thus be enough for you, especially if you need scrolling on a scroller-free device. It works very nicely with auto-focusing on and scrolling the Poser and DAZ UIs, and does the same with the PzDB 1.3 external content library manager. Very useful when scrolling past 463 similar MAT files. It’s also said to be especially unique and handy for handling scrolling and zooming on large 3D CAD files, which may also interest some readers. A commenter on the Carlton Bale page linked above said…

in CAD its function is to zoom in and out wherever you place the cursor. This is currently done with the wheel in jumps, as you can zoom only to the extent the finger can turn the wheel. And the wheel gets ruined very often. It’s a delight to just press the button and get to the required zoom at fantastic speed.

Which kind of suggests it may also be of use for things like Google Earth, though I’ve not tested it with that. I know it also works nicely with Trello, as it can also scroll sideways. A normal mouse will only scroll up and down on a Trello column. The original market was business people with big spreadsheets to navigate, hence it had to go sideways as well as up/down.

Back in Poser 11 it does not affect or work on the Poser dials, which is good, though it will scroll down a big list of morphs like any other long UI panel. It will not scroll up and down a long list of render presets in Poser, regrettably. Nor will its side-scroll work with the Poser 11 side-scrolling Material Room.

You can still make a static right-click and get the usual Windows context-menu.

Now my main problem was that it uses the right-click button, a problem possibly unique to me. Because using Scroll++ meant my trusty old StrokesPlus mouse-gestures software was bjorked, and StrokesPlus is vital for things like Back / Forward in a Web browser and in Explorer. Eek! Could StrokesPlus perhaps emulate the unique Scroll++, I wondered? Well, while it can assign things like a clunky PageUp key as acSendKeys(“{PGUP}”), its ‘local’ scrolling commands all now fail to work (not because of Scroll++, I might add). So no, StrokesPlus is not going to do what Scroll++ can do.

The most obvious solution, for me, was to…

    – run StokesPlus set to a right-click.
    – run Scroll++ set to a middle-click.

… and thus they don’t conflict and fight over the right-click. It’s easy to swop them over, if that proves more convenient for long periods of either 3D or Web work.

But this meant that my trusty five-year old and somewhat gunked Microsoft mouse was no longer up to the job of the middle-click. Even a cleaning and a generous squirt of WD40 would not fix it. Thus a new mouse was needed… with a highly sensitive middle-click (unlike the old one). Thankfully I had picked one up in a sale a while back, and it had been stashed in a drawer ‘waiting for the day’. It’s HP’s perfect wired clone of my previous and also perfect wired Microsoft mouse. I presume they’ve licensed this very affordable re-brand of Microsoft’s usually very expensive mouse. Get them while they’re hot.

So there, for those who need it, is the obvious additional solution to running StokesPlus (old LuaScript version) and Scroll++ 2.02 in tandem. A new mouse. The middle-click button is now a pressing-only button, although can also finesse the scroll with a slight nudge, and is thus less likely to become gunked up too quickly.