Honey, Please Shrink the Touchpad | Hacker News Reader

Honey, Please Shrink the Touchpad

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26 pointsingve60 comments

I have exactly the opposite issue. Apple's trackpads are so good at responsiveness, palm rejection, and overall smoothness that it's the very reason I can't ever seem to switch off of Macs.

I even use a Magic Trackpad at my desk.

Likewise. I can’t see myself going back to a mouse from the Magic Trackpad. I didn’t expect to like it, but the transition was practically instantaneous. What a nice device.

Like other people commenting, this sort of thing is part of what keeps me in the Apple ecosystem. I dislike so much, but really, really love a few things.

Meh. It’s such a good trackpad, but the way dragging works (for resizing, selecting, drag and drop) makes it borderline hostile on a 4k monitor. Once you reach the edge of trackpad, it stops.

Logitech trackball is not so accurate, but dragging and fast movement is miles better.

System Preferences -> Accessibility -> Pointer Control -> Trackpad Options -> Enable dragging.

I have it set "without drag lock". This way, a tap+hold allows you to drag without pressing on the trackpad, and there's a (very short) period where you can lift your finger, and keep dragging it from the centre or the opposite corner without losing the drag "lock".

Just set this up and it works beautifully. Saves my wrist some additional carpel tunnel for sure!

Am I doing something different than most? Admittedly, I don't use a 4k monitor. I would think you'd need to boost acceleration or scroll multiple times to get across the screen no matter the input. This also seems like an argument for the larger touchpads the author is complaining about.

resizing: I guess I'm not sure of the use case. In something like Maps, you just do the shrink/grow gesture multiple times. In photo apps I use a selection box, scale the window down and drag the corners are precise as I need. Maybe it's something I don't often do.

selecting: click and hold with my thumb, scroll down with index and middle finger or move cursor with my pointer. Or I click, scroll, then shift-click to select what I need.

drag and drop: click and hold with my thumb, drag the item by moving my index finger. You can left and drop your index finger as needed. Release thumb to drop.

I suspect the commenter is using “tap to click” which would cause the drag operation to be terminated once they lift up off of the trackpad.

I'm convinced that people who want physical buttons and small touchpads, or worse: people who like the trackpoint/nipple mouse on ThinkPads just haven't used a quality touch pad.

I don't really like macos at all, and their laptops are overpriced, but Apple has had best-in-breed touch pads for years.

I actually prefer the touchpad to a mouse for most tasks.

I'm convinced that people who like apple touch pad just haven't used a quality mouse.

There's proof for that, apple mouses are notoriously bad.

I used to tease my boyfriend for having to stop everything he's doing to charge his magic mouse once a week. Someday I'll miss technology designed this poorly.

I am the opposite. I much prefer a good ergonomic mouse to using the trackpad. My vertical mouse leaves my wrists and fingers feeling much better than a trackpad after a long session. I ususally turn off all gestures that I can on a touchpad to avoid any accidents.

I will agree that touchpads that require you to click in specific locations are bad though. They confound the action of clicking with the action of pointing, which causes every click to require extra brainpower that you just don't need with a mouse or a 'tappable' touchpad.

I used to struggle with RSI issues until I stopped using an external keyboard / mouse, and started using a macbook many years ago. The trackpad under the keyboard minimizes wrist movements.

IMO, this is far more ergonomic arrangement than a mouse next to a keyboard will ever be.

In fact, I'm kind of annoyed there isn't any external integrated keyboard/trackpad setups with the trackpad centered below the keyboard.

I used to struggle with RSI issues until I stopped using a laptop keyboard and touchpad and switched to an ergonomic mouse and keyboard. My hands are too big for even a 15" laptop, so switching between keyboard and touchpad required uncomfortable wrist motion. I also worked on a lot of things that required clicking around UI's (think 3D/CAD/Games) where the speed of action with a mouse was far higher than with a touchpad.

All goes to show that ergonomics are somewhat subjective, and there's no best solution that fits everyone.

Interesting, I usually keep my fingers on the homerow keys and when I move my right hand to the trackpad I'm usually rotating my elbow or slightly pulling in my arm and bringing my hand to the trackpad with very little wrist movement.

But I'm not surprised my situation doesn't always apply to other people.

Just throwing this in there for anyone who might be reading, there's a product called the Rollermouse that is another good option. Check out Rollermouse Red.

https://www.contourdesign.com/product-category/rollermouse/

> I'm convinced that people who want physical buttons and small touchpads, or worse: people who like the trackpoint/nipple mouse on ThinkPads just haven't used a quality touch pad.

I find this pretty patronizing. I've used many of these computers, including macs, and I don't care for it at all. All this software works great right up to the point that it doesn't and does something I don't want, which for whatever reason is too frequent to be annoying.

Maybe I need to improve my motor skills or "hold it in a different way" or whatever, but just three buttons already works well enough for me so I prefer that.

Apple, without a doubt, has the best touch pad. The size of the 2015 MBP touchpad was perfect then Apple decided to super size it. Still don't understand the decision behind it.

I don't really like clicky touchpads, so I consider that a bad point of most of these Apple trackpads. Apple trackpads still work better than anything on Windows cause software stack? I can't stand how mice work on macs, the acceleration curve is terrible so that's a trade off...

The force sensitive trackpad is nice because you can click with little pressure, taking away my biggest gripe about clicky trackpads.

Apple trackpads haven’t physically clicked in a while. It’s just a virtual click now which you can turn off

which is some kind of beautiful implementation tbh... everyone thinks it's a real click

One of those side benefits of the iPhone business, I suppose. “Haptic Feedback” started out, I would guess, as the vibration setting for iPhone notifications. The “vibration module” became more advanced, with support for very fine motor control, evolving into the Haptic Engine and a first-class feature when 3D Touch was announced. Not to mention its centrality to the Apple Watch and how it handles everything from notifications to scrolling the Digital Crown. It’s since spread to the MacBook line and perhaps further.

Indeed, one of those small innovations that sticks despite likely coming out of some adjacent failures.

are you sure the built in trackpads do not click? i remember the article about the external magic trackpads not clicking via pivot, but via haptic effect.

They don’t click when the power is off.

You can adjust both the ‘clickiness’ and the acceleration curve of the trackpad on any semi-modern MacBook.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204352

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-your-mouses-...

I keep hearing this a lot on Hackernews, about how Apple trackpads are a perfect cinnamon roll of a pointing device.

I found the trackpad on my work Mac so irksome to use that I expensed a Bluetooth mouse to use with it. Other PC trackpads are not that much worse the Apple ones; they're all uniformly annoying AF.

Maybe this isn't much an issue on MacOS (I never use it), but to me as soon as you can't right click with one hand with trackpad, there is no way I would use it over a mouse.

And how do you do middle click at all even with two hands? I use that frequently (browsers, CAD, etc..).

Say what? Hasn't "two finger tap == right click" been a thing for like 15 years?

Three-finger tap to middle click is the same, again for years.

How do you enable three-finger tap to be middle click? The only thing I have found is Cmd+two-finger tap to be the middle click. I just took a look in the track pad system prefs, and nothing about a 3-finger tap. I'd love to have a one-handed middle click option.

I don't think it's a thing on Windows, but I don't have a laptop with me RN to test.

It's a thing on Windows, and they have a bunch of other ones (including triple taps, swipes..etc)

With that said, first thing I turn off on a new Windows install on a laptop is...well, it's telemetry, but after that it's the gestures.

It's definitely a thing on my wife's crappy Dell XPS running windows 10.

>Three-finger tap to middle click

How do you drag with that though

Can you do this at all with a trackpad and physical buttons? When I use the physical buttons on my (quite large) trackpad, I use 2 hands, but a real mouse makes a world of difference, and I can't get enough precision out of a trackpad to design anything.

I have not once in my 36 years of life had to middle-click-drag, so... I don't know.

Super common in CAD/CAM/3D modeling apps like Autodesk Fusion 360.

I do that frequently on my desktop to scroll webpages. However, with a touchpad, there’s a gesture for that (tm)…

There's no middle click with MacOS trackpad, gestures replace that. Like 3 finger swipe left/right for example.

I would actually prefer to have both a trackpoint and a nice MacBook style trackpad, mainly because trackpoints are hard to beat in cramped quarters.

I can confirm this is a nice use case: I had this on a ThinkPad once, though the pad was not MacBook big. It was also nice to be able to do some mouse movements with the trackpoint without having to alter your hand position on the keyboard to use the pad.

I have Ubuntu 21.04 on a Thinkpad X1 and a 2017 (?) MBP and the difference in trackpad quality is astounding.

I mean at the end of the day the pad itself is just a piece of capacitive plastic or glass.

It shows that Apple with its gobs of money can pay engineers to work on the unsexy bits like the touchpad drivers.

Meanwhile libinput on Linux is still immature and I can't blame anyone for that.

It's not clear from your comment which is better?

Ah, sorry. That's what happens when I go stream-of-consciousness. :)

The experience with Ubuntu+MBP is way better than Ubuntu+Thinkpad. As far as I can tell they are using the same drivers (I've tried installing multiple different drivers on the Thinkpad and then uninstalled them.) My conclusion is that MBP trackpad hardware is just that much better than the Thinkpad.

Not him but my I also have an Ubuntu laptop and a MacBook and my MacBook is the only laptop trackpad that I’ve ever not just been completely frustrated with. I still prefer an actual mouse, I always to swipe multiple times to get fully across the screen, but macOS and the MacBook trackpad is actually usable

I generally disable the track pad on my laptops, whether windows or Linux.

Whatever the merits as a pointing and gesture device, I just can't live with random palm touches or whatever accidentally triggering while typing. I've never found one that worked well enough to just use it. So I stick to ergonomic mice, or the track point if I don't have the mouse handy.

+1 on this. Maybe it's because my laptop usage predates trackpads?

First thing I do when using a laptop for any length of time, is break out my wireless travelling mouse, and plug in it's dongle, and disable the on-board trackpad.

I have to wonder what OS OP is using. I once installed Linux mint on a MacBook and found the trackpad immediately very frustrating and had all the issues listed. But on macOS or even fedora, I did not have any issues at all.

Big trackpads require good software along with them and it sounds like OP may be running an OS without this software.

For those that don't want to move their hands, the TrackPoint (the red thing in the middle of keyboard) found in Lenovo professional lineup might be good choice.

Personally I'm still using it instead of trackpad, although operations such as zooming in and panning are a bit cumbersome.

I have the same experience as the author. Not having physical buttons at the bottom is a dealbreaker for me. I use the trackpad with the thumb on the buttons and move around with the index finger, and never felt the need for a trackpad larger than the 8cmx4.5cm that I have. I feel bigger trackpads just get in the way more

FWIW with the Apple trackpad, you can still do that? You leave your thumb on the bottom and use your index finger to move and it knows what you are doing. It even simulates the device clicking with haptic feedback so good it is like evil magic... when the device is off I find myself accidentally nearly destroying it trying to click it as my brain is just so thoroughly convinced that it is a physical button but in fact it simply doesn't move.

Here I thought big touchpads were to allow both fast and precise movements?

And amplitude of gestures.

Of course you can zoom and scroll with a small touchpad, but a larger one allows you to go much longer on the same command.

Keyboards are much more fast and precise.

On the one hand, yes, and I use keynav for a reason. On the other hand, keyboard isn't great at the stuff a mouse is good at, and certainly not without extra training.

I like the huge touchpad on my MBP 13". I don't miss the smaller ones at all.

> After years of struggling with ghost clicks, randomly dragged icons, poor palm rejection, and generally ever worsening MacBook trackpads, I didn’t want to deal with software features trying to compensate for a trackpad’s lack of physical features.

After reading this i feel like the author is in a different universe than the one i'm in. I've had 0 of those issues with mac trackpads.

The problem with small trackpads is if you’re trying to drag something from one corner of the screen to the other you run out of space unless you have the sensitivity jacked way up. But then it’s too sensitive for smaller movements. Anyway, I carry a wireless mouse with me everywhere and plug it in whenever I need to do real work so I’m probably not the target demographic.

The touchpad works like magic for me, can't see go back to the window trackpad anymore. I also don't like the mouse, my hand hurts after using it few hours.

I can't imagine wanting physical buttons (places for gunk to stuck and things to get physically worn out) over a good touchpad.

Apple may have gotten it wrong in the past with the fragile and bad feel of butterfly keyboards but Taptic Engine touchpads are the gd best thing to happen to input devices in a while.

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