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Comment by isostatic | Hacker News Reader

> The touchpad on my macbook pro is just such an amazing feature, so intuitive. So 'just right'

Do you find the original scrolling mechanism, or the reversed scrolling mechanism, to be "just right"?

> Do you find the original scrolling mechanism, or the reversed scrolling mechanism, to be "just right"?

I can’t tell if you’re referring to the present default scroll behavior or that which was default several years ago. Given that this can be changed in the System Preferences app, it’s a non-argument. It can be set to scroll in either direction.

All that said, I’ve been tremendously disappointed with the new HP laptop touchpad at my current employer. My MBA gets it so right that every shortcoming of the HP is obvious. It requires far more effort to be accurate.

Both were right.

The original direction made some sense when transitioning from mice with scroll wheels. (Though it is debatable whether the mouse wheel's direction was ever right.)

The current "reversed" direction makes more sense in an era of iPads, smartphones and touch screens.

Both are right. The original makes sense when using a mouse. The reversed makes sense on touch screens. I use both.

The "reversed" (more accurately the natural direction) makes just as much sense with a trackpad as a touchscreen... And I would argue that the original mouse wheel got it wrong too.

The original one is the reversed one. Fingers go up, content goes down. That’s wrong as anyone who has used a phone or tablet can tell you.

They fixed it, so now it is indeed “just right”.

It took me about two days to adapt to "natural scrolling" (reversed) and I would never go back. :)

You can reverse the scroll direction on Windows with a PowerShell command:

https://superuser.com/questions/310681/inverting-direction-o...

Depends if you think you're moving the document, or moving the viewport. Touchscreen behaviour is touching the document and moving it up, while your view remains the same. Traditional scroll behavior is that you're moving the view of your document down while the document itself doesn't move.

Either way, one method is "the original one", the other method is the opposite, or reversed, from the original method.

I don't really care either way - it's a setting so you can use what you prefer.

But the default Apple 'moving the document' setting is extremely consistent with the rest of the trackpad. When you use one finger you move the cursor, not the viewport relative to the cursor. Why would it be different with two fingers?

Traditional scrolling is consistent with the arrow keys, that is, moving your fingers down on the scroll wheel or the trackpad moves in the same direction as pressing the down arrow in the keyboard. (The arrow keys traditionally move a text cursor through the document, and the scrolling happens when it hits an edge; this is why they content scrolls in the opposite direction.)

For the same reason that controllers have both "normal" and "inverted". It's all in your point of view. Are you controlling like a mouse (up on the joystick looks up) or like a joystick (forward on the joystick is like tilting your head forward, and looks down).

For me, I hate the "natural" scrolling, because I map scrolling motions to "up" and "down". Moving my fingers downward should do what I think of as "down", which is to see what's below my current screen. I have an XPS 15 with the touchscreen, and only when you're actually touching the screen does "down moves the document down (and goes up toward the top)" make sense.

> The original one is the reversed one. Fingers go up, content goes down.

Fingers go up, viewport goes up, as with a scroll wheel. Neither is reversed, they're just different interpretations of the action.

> That’s wrong as anyone who has used a phone or tablet can tell you.

Nonsense. With a phone or tablet, you're manipulating the content itself, directly. Not so with a trackpad or mouse. The display is not under my trackpad.

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