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Comment by dpcx | Hacker News Reader

As someone who prefers Natural Scroll (and who understands that there are people who don't), why would someone want Natural Scroll on one interaction method and not on another? That feels like confusion waiting to happen, IMHO.

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I have been looking for a solution to this problem for a very long time and my reasoning is that on a trackpad, natural makes a lot of sense intuitively, since you are "pushing" the document (page/app/whatever) the direction you want it to move.

Whereas when I am using a mouse I feel like I the document is below the mouse more or less and when I move the scrollwheel it is physically moving the document as if it was tied to the scrollwheel.

Not sure if that makes any sense, as this is just some internal feelings on it, but I have beeen manually toggling the natural scroll when i plug and unplug my mouse ever since I started using MacOs

Yeah I think the exact same way! The top of the physical wheel spins the opposite direction of the bottom of the wheel which would be "touching" the page/content. Originally I was going to just make a background script to automatically toggle the option when it detects certain USB devices (like my mouse) but I couldn't find a way to apply settings changed via the "defaults write" command without logging out and then back in. In my research I came across discrete-scroll and scroll reverser on GitHub. Discrete-scroll worked in Catalina but had no GUI, and Scroll Reverser didn't work reliably on Catalina. So I combined the ideas from both in as little Swift code as possible so that anyone using my app wouldn't need to worry about allowing the app to "control your computer".

I have to say I really appreciate this! I was going down very similar lines just last week (I had installed Hammerspoon and was experimenting with some applescript hacks, but to no avail).

Just intercepting the actual scroll and inverting it is a really elegant solution (that doesn't require a relog) which is great.

This solves one of the two biggest gripes I had about MacOs - with the other being my inablility to "pin" my dock to one of my monitors, overriding the swap functionality. Thanks!

I've always pictured scrolling as moving a camera or visor over a static sheet.

I'm the same as you, and it also took me a while to figure out why it was. The best explanation I could come up with is that it felt like I was moving the scroll bar with a scroll wheel, while that's clearly not the case when I'm using a trackpad or touch.

honestly, if this popped up more than 2 weeks ago i'd wonder the same thing. i love the way the mac trackpad works, including the scroll direction. but i plugged a mouse in and was doing some gaming stuff. it is unintuitive as hell to have the scroll wheel go the 'opposite' way for zooming on an rts. i changed the setting for the mouse, and later when on the trackpad again, wondered why the hell it was backwards. no idea why 1 setting, in 2 locations, uses the same config value.

Natural scroll direction while using a mouse isn't traditionally how one would use a mouse - but the issue is if you set the scroll direction to change for your mouse (on a mac) it also sets it for your trackpad.

I have always used a mouse when scrolling down makes the page go down, and on the trackpad scrolling down makes the page go up. It makes sense to me somehow, probably because I'm used to the input method of a phone's scrolling and so that transfers to a trackpad naturally.

When I use a mouse, I always expect pulling the scrollwheel towards me to move the page downwards. That is just how it has been my entire life.

However, when I use a touch surface such as a trackpad or touchscreen I like to push the page up.

disclaimer: not a magic mouse user.

I only use trackpads on osx, but I use scroll wheels on linux and windows too. So I'm fine with whatever on the trackpad, but I need my mouse to stay consistent with the rest of the world.

I map “natural” on the touchpad to moving the page. I map “natural” on the scroll wheel to moving the scrollbar. Both are “natural”, but opposite.

I get confused about which is natural and which is normal scroll but I have subconscious muscle memory, so if this tools helps people that for whatever reason were trained to have this subconscious muscle memory / why not? It's all pretty arbitrary anyway. Aren't your eyes bolted on upside down and your brain has a layer that inverts it?

Our eyes aren't "upside down" it's just that light passing through a convex lens (the front of our eyes) gets flipped.

I like Natural Scroll on the trackpad because my mind somewhat subconsciously maps the page onto the trackpad. Then, scrolling on the trackpad is like dragging the page up or down with my fingers.

Mentally, the same mapping does not happen with a scroll wheel. So it’s a weird psychological block when I scroll down with a scroll wheel and the page goes up.

For me, it’s because my muscle memory for a mouse (which I use primarily on my work Windows computer, occasionally on my Mac laptop) is different than a trackpad (which I only use with my Mac laptop). Unfortunately, macOS doesn’t let you set different options for each.

"Interaction method" here is a name for entirely different stacks starting from the hardware that just happen to be abstracted the same way by the OS.

Why would people be confused by some piece of hardware not behaving like some completely different piece of hardware?

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