Comment by AndrewDavis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewDavis | Hacker News Reader

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My goodness.

Recently I went to play a game on my laptop, something i don't normally do. I'm not even normally a windows user.

It has this 'feature' where if a key is pressed then it disables all mouse clicks for X number of seconds. This is to prevent a forearm from tap to clicking on the touchpad while typing. Absolutely makes sense.

Only... I had a mouse plugged in. It disabled a physical USB mouse from clicking after a keypress. Even after disabling the touchpad entirely it continued this behaviour.

After some Googling there should have been a switch in the modern Windows 10 style mouse config. But it wasn't there.

More Googling, "go edit this registry key" but i didn't have that registry key.

More Googling, the registry key depends on your touchpad driver.

More Googling finally found a way to disable it globally with regedit.

#1 Why was the switch not available in the mouse settings #2 Why was it applied to a usb mouse #3 Why did the registry key differ depending on mousepad driver.

Just a nightmare.

This one is mostly the touchpad driver being poorly written and or outdated. Let me guess, Synaptics touchpad?

For some inexplicable reason their newer touchpads (in newer laptops) support the Settings configuration, whereas their older ones (in older laptops) only work via the Mouse Control Panel applet (and sometimes not even then).

I've also had their touchpad driver cause keyboard input latency (it tries to hook hotkeys) with uninstalling it entirely and having no touchpad being the only solution. Their stuff is just bad, and they should feel bad about it.

I doubt they do feel bad as they have a seeming monopoly on Windows laptop touchpads.

I've got a Macbook Pro and it doesn't seem to have or need this feature in the first place.

It does have an analogous feature, the MBP's trackpad is huge and you probably touch it by accident all the time.

It's just that Apple's system tries to separate deliberate touches from accidental ones, rather than disabling the trackpad input completely.

You used to be able to turn this on and off (it was called "Ignore accidental trackpad input" in the trackpad preference pane) but now it's an always on feature. The trackpad has extended so far into the palm rests that it would be very difficult to use without it, and the feature works well enough that you don't even realize it's happening.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201822

Yes, I touch the pad by accident all the time. But why is Apple so good at detecting which touches are accidental, while so many other manufacturers are not?

On Linux this works similarly. ~5 years ago my old laptops did the 'disable touchpad when typing' thing, now with libinput the touchpad has excellent and completely invisible (to the user) anti-false-touch functionality.

Apple has invested the time to make great trackpad drivers. People have invested time to make libinput a great driver for Linux (in this regard - it does lack customization possible in older drivers).

On Windows the manufacturers don't care. IIRC MS is doing a thing where manufacturers can add some property to their touchpad HW/drivers which tells Windows to handle the touchpad entirely on its own, and the result has been that touchpads have been improving significantly over the last few years since MS is investing time in making good drivers. But that depends on your specific touchpad allowing Windows to do its magic, instead of using crappy OEM drivers.

That is fantastic news about Linux. I bought a System76 four or five years ago and the touchpad was terrible. It wasn't just false touches; it was really hard to accurately click on something, the pointer kept making little jumps. Would you say that's better too?

If touchpads are good now, then I might go dedicated Linux again when it's time to upgrade from my aging MBP.

Try making an Ubuntu/Fedora USB and booting from it once on your MBP, that should let you see what it's like. I had to explicitly disable the 'disable touchpad while typing' libinput setting but aside from that everything works great out of the box.

Cool, thanks!

It may work quite often without me knowing, but ever since I got a 2017 Mac I have multiple events per day where my typing ends up in a random location due to phantom clicks. Perhaps I should disable tap to click, even though I really dislike clicking via the force push.

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