How is it possible to emulate mouse wheel scrolling using the touch screen on Windows 8.1? I.e. remapping touch gestures to mouse events

Question

I recently bought the Surface Pro 3 and noticed a very annoying problem concerning all applications that do not yet support touch input.

For example: The note taking application "Evernote" does not support scrolling by touch input, so it is neccassary to use the sidebars for scrolling which makes Evernote practically unuseable without a mouse with a mouse wheel (lot of Evernote users complain about this on Evernote forums but have not yet found a solution.)

The same problem is present in other applications that don't support touch input yet.

On the other hand, everything works fine if I use a mouse wheel for scrolling but what is the point of having a touch screen if you are forced to use a mouse for scrolling?

I am wondering if there is a way to send mouse wheel scrolling events to an application (in this example to Evernote) by using the touch screen only?

For example by swiping with two/three fingers up and down ?

Any ideas? With some custom software perhaps? Like AutoHotkey, or something similar?

EDIT:

Here is a similar question : Detecting touch screen presses in AutoHotkey in Windows 8

Here is a possible answer:

http://www.autohotkey.com/board/topic/104022-remapping-touchscreen-gestures/

http://www.lovemysurface.net/touchme-gesture-studio-review/

Solution

I can confirm that the $4.99 (at time of writing) TouchMe Engine, with its gesture-editing windows store app TouchMe Gesture Studio, allows you to map new gestures to the mouse scroll wheel, so for example I've been using three-finger swipe up and down to drive the mouse wheel up and down, and another gesture to make the on-screen keyboard appear or disappear.

Works quite nicely, much better than no scroll at all.

My use-case is Remote Desktop (to a desktop) on the Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 convertible laptop, with its ultra-high-res screen - remote desktop looks like a flea circus, the scrollbar in every window within the RDP session is a very thin line, impossible to hit by touch. Add to that the lack of soft keyboard support, and something like this becomes essential.

I'm still hoping someone's going to figure out to add this to AutoHotKey in the near future, though, or at least an new open-source application along the lines of the TouchMe Engine. Proprietary (and cheap) utilities that sink their hooks into windows applications always worry me, there's no way to be sure what they're doing and there's no basis on which to trust the "brand".

Comments

[Ramhound]

No; The applications need to be update to interface with the new input device. This is like asking if you can emulate a keyboard with your 17-button mouse.

[Ramhound]

I wasn't trying to be rude. I used an example to explain that using a touch input device to emulate a mouse input device isn't going to be possible. Why are you being rude? Furthermore an application needs to be updated to support touch period. AutoHotkey would not be useful in a case like this.

[user1198559]

You are not answering the question. AutoHotkey does exectly this, it can transform a keyboard event to any given mouse event. A keyboard event is conceptually the same as a touch event. It's kinda obvious that the app needs to be updated if it does not support touch input but I don't want to wait for that, I need a solution right now. So please try to think before posting nonsense comments and don't waste my time. Thanks!

[Tao]

Most important for me: Remote Desktop - unusable in tablet mode, even for browsing, as the scrolling doesn't work.