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Comment by usaphp | Hacker News Reader

> using a pen on the Laptop is inconvenient at best, downright idiotic at worst. You have to grab the lid to try to steady it and stop the whole thing wobbling and moving.

I wonder how many of you are using touch screens on a laptop, especially when your main job is programming?

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I am (Lenovo Yoga user). It behaves like a two-in-one device, where you can tilt the screen all the way.

I'm not using it for programming per se, but when I'm casually browsing the Internet, clicking on links, switching between YouTube videos and things like that, touchscreen is way more convenient than a traditional keyboard.

I use it all the time, when I work without a monitor and keyboard. Mostly for switching apps and starting stuff - the windows task bar is only just above the function keys after all.

I also swipe from the right for quick settings (brightness, network, quiet mode, etc) all the time. Like in phones, it's a super fast way to scroll something exactly to where you want it.

Oh, and scrolling. I ditched sublime for vs code just because it scrolls on touch+drag and sublime selects text.

It's gotten so far that when I find myself on a laptop without a touchscreen I get all confused and keep touching the screen.

I really love touch screens.

> Mostly for switching apps

But if your hands are already on a keyboard isn't clicking alt-tab faster than lifting your wrists and do sliding gesture?

I have a Dell XPS 15 (the previous gen, with rounded corners) with a 4K touchscreen. Ignoring the fact that 4K is useless on a Windows machine that's mostly used with external normal-DPI monitors (I mostly run it at 1080p resolution with all DPI scaling stuff turned hard off, imho it's the only way to get Windows to behave), the touchscreen is a gimmick at best - I tried using it productively, but even the rather shitty touchpad is better to use.

My personal laptop has pen-input but it's got the rotation feature that the article complains the Surface doesn't. (It says "360-degree" which makes no sense to me; my screen turns 180 degrees and can then be folded down to clip into the laptop keyboard.)

Getting it all running on Linux was doable but definitely not for the faint of heart. But once I did, Xournal was one of the most useful pieces of software for my physics Master's; if the lecturer provides PDFs of lecture slides in advance you can literally just take notes on the slides themselves; or just file them away in a neat folder structure.

Maybe the biggest difference from paper is you can quickly draw a rectangle around part of the preceding equation, and either drag it or copy-and-paste it.

Touch input was nice for browsing and certain games, but was never a huge part of my work.

360-degree hinges have the screen simply go all the way around the keyboard, from the front to the back. As that means the back of the screen then has the keyboard on it, they tend to disable the keyboard. The Thinkpad X1 Carbon even flattens and locks the keyboard so it doesn't feel weird.

(Oops, wrong product name. Thinkpad X1 Yoga.)

My laptop has a touchscreen (Dell XPS 13) and the first thing I did was disable it.

When I had one, I used the touch for navigation and that's pretty much it. Text selection, moving around a document/source file, even file management was a pain.

Surfing the web, zooming smoothly and consuming media is what it's for. Stackoverflow I guess

Constantly on my Surface, which remains rock steady due to the stand.

I have lots of beefs with the Surface, but the stand is not one of them. That's got to be in the top 5 best features ever fitted to a tablet.

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