On some mice, the mouse wheel scrolls freely, continuing even after the finger is removed. It can even be silent. When the bottom of a page is reached, it might continue scrolling invisibly to the user. I'm often finding if I press Ctrl-W too quickly (to close the page), the Ctrl gets paired with the wheel to change the zoom level, which is annoying. It might be nice to have some kind of visual feedback when the wheel is active - perhaps part of the cursor or something.
Is this on X11, or Wayland, or both? I think we can probably also detect when the modifier key was pressed after the scroll began and filter it out for this.
We can't detect free-scrolling mouse wheels vs. normal mouse wheel events. Maybe it could be if the kernel gains some way to detect these mice (and if the scroll wheel is unlocked for actual free spinning), but right now we unfortunately can't do anything about this
Even if we can't distinguish a free-spinning scroll wheel from other types of scrolls, could we filter out modifier key presses that are initiated during a scroll, as opposed to before the scroll begins?
There's no "during a scroll", there's just scroll events coming from the kernel without any context.
Ah ok, darn.