Hacker News Reader

Comment by rco8786 | Hacker News Reader

> Trackpad gesture require a ... trackpad, and trackpad are worst than a mouse.

Interesting, as an engineer I prefer my trackpad 100x over a normal mouse...almost solely because of the gesture abilities.

Agreed on the rest of your points.

View on HN

I mainly use a workstation on a large desk in an office. If you use your laptop everywhere, on small table, desk, knee, trackpad are great because a mouse is basically unusable. But on a desk with plenty of space ?

Also, from a medical point of view, I think a mouse is better than a trackpad. But I m not an expert in that field.

On a Windows box I would agree, but on macOS gestures are so productive that you actually lose quite a bit of productivity by using a mouse - even Apple's Magic Mouse.

Yea - I use a separate magic trackpad at my desk, always. I don't even own a regular mouse.

Honest curiosity: How many gestures do you regularly use? How many buttons does your mouse have?

Not the person you're asking, but on my macbook I frequently use:

two-finger swipe right (go back) four-finger swipe up (overview) four-finger swipe down (change between multiple windows of the same program) four-finger swipe left-right (change virtual desktops) pinch to zoom in/out

The first four would be easy to bind to a mouse button, but the pinch zooming is really handy.

I got sick of not having a pinch to zoom gesture on my Windows desktop, so I bound Ctrl to a mouse button and hold it while using the scroll wheel. It's pretty handy, I wish I could do it on all mice.

In a lot of Windows applications, and in the mainstream browsers, holding down the CTRL key and spinning the mousewheel gives you a zoom functionality. It's built in by default.

Not OP, but I use gestures religiously. Four fingers to the side to switch desktops (useful for 'categorizing' multiple projects), four fingers up to view all windows in a desktop, four fingers down to view all windows of the active app. Insanely useful and productive.

I don't have a regular mouse, so 0. I probably use 5-8 gestures regularly? Mostly just two and three finger swipes in various directions.

I use gestures all the time on my Magic Trackpad 2. Let's say I'm just surfing the web on my iMac. I might use:

- two-finger swipe left and right to go back and forwards - two-finger double tap to zoom in and out - pinch to zoom in and out - pinch to view all tabs - three-finger double tap to look up a word in the built-in dictionary, which I do a lot to get the definition of Japanese words in English - three-finger drag to copy images or downloads to a folder or into another window, especially if I'm editing a document - four-finger swipe up to switch to another application's window, especially if I'm dragging something - four-finger swipe down to switch to another browser window

I'm using these gestures frequently to efficiently move things around when I'm editing a document, making a presentation, or even when restoring a file to a previous version or copying something out of a file's previous version to drop into the current version.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com