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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

The touchpads on Macs are, in my opinion, one of the biggest advantages they have. It's not just multitouch, it's also the sensitivity, the clarity between clicks and scrolling, and the general responsiveness of it. Force clicks are one exception: when I force click it's almost always by accident and I have never found a situation where force click was tied to useful functionality.

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I think force click to look up the dictionary is useful, but that's pretty much it.

I set up my dictionary lookups to be done with a three-finger tap. Much easier.

My Catalina install broke the dictionary app for me, so there are no dictionaries other than Wikipedia. This was one of the most useful features of force touch for me :(

You can reinstall macOS without erasing your data or apps. Maybe give that a try. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904

today I learned why my computer so often pops up the dictionary for no clear reason

I use a mac for work and have definitely spent some significant time working with it as an actual laptop.

I really do appreciate the smooth scroll physics. But I really can't figure out why every raves about the gestures. I only ever trigger them by accident. I think I eventually turned them off, but only after screwing up a few times and thinking that I might some day actually want to use them.

If you're already a heavy keyboard shortcut user (especially the control+arrow keys on macOS), the touchpad gestures might not seem as useful. However, they are intuitive and natural in a way that keyboard shortcuts aren't, in my opinion.

Yeah, fair enough.

I force click to Ctrl-Click in my IDE and makes it much more confortable to navigate one handed when combined with gestures for forwards and backwards movement.

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