Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spartan-S63 | Hacker News Reader

I'm always perplexed when I hear that people suffer accidental clicks and poor palm rejection on a MacBook Pro trackpad. I've never had such an incident, but I can see how it's possible.

Some opinions on trackpads: - Tap to click should _always_ be turned off; it's bad and it should feel bad - More apps should take advantage of multi-level clicking

Personally, I love Apple trackpads so much that I use one (Magic Trackpad 2) when my laptop is docked to my monitor. Mice just don't do it for me anymore on macOS. They just feel clunky.

Edit: Also, Apple should promote the "three finger drag" Accessibility setting to the Trackpad settings. It's far superior to all other drag-via-the-touchpad options, IMO.

View on HN

Just a data point, but tap-to-click is the first thing I enable on a new Mac. So, no. It doesn't feel bad and it shouldn't feel bad either. It's efficient, and on the newer trackpads, with tap over click, you're opting for tactility over haptics.

BetterTouchTool supercharges tap with more advanced interactions, making it even more relevant.

On top of that, I enable locking drag, which makes moving things around much easier and faster.

And no, this latest incarnation of the trackpad is just perfect. Do not shrink it. Thank you.

Not sure I understand the hate on tap to click? A single tap has always felt more responsive than a forced click, especially when clicking on a larger trackpad that has to have a large percentage of the pad actuated.

I think the use of multiple fingers is a better solution than an arbitrary click length. Two finger tap for extra options has been a game changer for me.

Because simply putting my finger onto the trackpad may trigger a click when I only intended to move the cursor or even just rest my finger. Leads to unintentionally following links or dragging things around.

Is there a reason why you have to rest your finger on the trackpad? For myself I view the trackpad as the one place you'd want to avoid resting any appendages on, unless you need to interact with it.

For example, I haven't heard of similar arguments for a phone's touch screen, probably because you don't rest your thumbs on the screen itself.

Maybe resting it there was the wrong way to put it. It's more like I think I'm going to want to move the cursor in the next few seconds, so I put my finger down there.

Sure, I could train myself to not do that if I really needed to, but the thing is that I don't need to since I can turn off tap to click.

I'm not sure why phones are different here though. This isn't something I've been conscious of. Maybe it's because the thumb's natural position when holding a phone is to actually hover above the screen? Or maybe touches just register differently enough on a phone that it's not a problem?

At least on my Macs, if I rest my finger on the trackpad, without moving, thinking of where to move the cursor next... It doesn't register as a click. It acts exactly as expected: if I lift my finger, it still won't register as a click, and if I start gliding on the trackpad, it will register as mouse movements.

But it's not just putting a finger on the trackpad, that doesn't trigger a click. It's a really quick tap. But I'm not out to convince anyone so do your thing :)

> Not sure I understand the hate on tap to click?

Sometimes I start to move the mouse cursor, and then change my mind, after I put my finger down, but before I move it.

This room-for-indecision is totally fine if I'm using push-to-click, but tap-to-click doesn't let me just hang out with my finger touching the mouse cursor.

As a result, if you're using tap-to-click, you are forced to think about what you're doing before you do it. You can't think while in the process of doing it. This means that your finger becomes less of an extension of your brain. You have to keep more private, and inside. You are less embodied.

> This room-for-indecision is totally fine if I'm using push-to-click, but tap-to-click doesn't let me just hang out with my finger touching the mouse cursor.

This works as expected on my Macs with tap to click turned on. see my other comment in this thread.

Anecdotal but I feel the same.

I initially had some palm-rejection issues with the very first "oversized" MacBook Pro trackpad (2016?), but I think that must have been resolved by an update. I can't recall having problems with accidental clicks in years, and I too have a Magic Trackpad for my docked laptop.

Having used non-Apple laptops with trackpads, I have always been surprised at how universally awful they've been. Maybe things have improved now, but one of the greatest crimes I noticed was trackpads where certain regions behaved completely differently. I think on some of them, the right side of the trackpad—completely unidentifiable by touch—would trigger scrolling instead of moving the cursor. I struggle to understand who could have thought this would be a good idea, but apparently somebody must find it useful.

I've never known about the the three-finger drag setting but I'll give it a shot. I disagree a bit with tap-to-click, which apparently I've had enabled without issue but I don't believe I actually ever use it.

I hated trackpads until I tried the Apple trackpad. Especially the new ones that use haptics yet still require some force to trigger a click. I won't say I've had zero problems with the trackpad, but I no longer miss trackpoint nubs.

I still haven't found any non-Apple trackpads that perform as well. Even the "precision touchpad" compatible trackpads on Windows machines gave me an annoying number of issues with registering correctly.

> Edit: Also, Apple should promote the "three finger drag" Accessibility setting to the Trackpad settings. It's far superior to all other drag-via-the-touchpad options, IMO.

The three finger drag is what I configure first, and it’s one thing I sorely miss on a new Windows laptop. Windows 10 gestures seem so primitive in comparison. I agree that this should be enabled by default on macOS.

Well, I use Magic Trackpad on my desktop, and prefer it except for drawing diagrams (somehow a mouse feels nicer for that).

But I _hate_ clicking and love tap to click on the trackpad because it is much less error-prone from a precision standpoint (applying pressure invariably moves the cursor, which does not happen for me on a mouse).

I do agree on the three-finger drag aspect, though. That is the only way I drag windows around (again, would be harder to do if I pressed to click).

> "...three-finger drag aspect, though. That is the only way I drag windows..."

i drag via single-finger force-click on the title bar. it's even easier (to me) than 3-finger drag (requires slightly less finger coordination). i use this all the time to drag windows to different spaces via the ctrl-<number> keyboard shortcut, which you can do with the other hand.

Drag modifier key like cmd used to work pretty well too, but there was risks if accidental drags

yah, i use cmd-drag sometimes too, usually for smaller adjustments, using my pinky on cmd. it's not quite as reliable (for me), as i lose the drag occasionally, having to go back and pick it up again.

Multi-level clicking… is that what they used to call force touch? If so, it’s interesting you say that, because I think it should be consigned to the fires of hell. My failure rate (at clicking with the correct force) is around 20-40%. My less tech-savvy relatives always seem to find their Apple trackpads confusing and unintuitive, they never understand why they have to click several times to get it to do what they want, and they are usually very pleased to discover this complication can be disabled. I also hate tap-to-click, but relatives mostly seem to like it and mostly understand it.

I often unintentionally clicked it because of the way I held my hands dangling over it. I'm not sure if that was just how I preferred to hold my hands, or I was subconsciously scared of resting the heels of my hands directly on it while typing. But yeah, tap to click was also a mistake akin to waving around a loaded gun.

> Tap to click should _always_ be turned off

It’s off by default, so someone at Apple seems to agree :)

It’s the first thing I usually turn on. The next being “dragging (without drag lock)” which has been hiding in Accessibility for a while now.

I have large hands, so my palms don't rest on the trackpad when typing, they brush it. So the palm rejection doesn't work very well for me. I have tap to click disabled as well.

I love tap to click!

I should be able to have tap to click, and no accidental clicks. The best of both worlds, just like I used to, when the trackpad was a reasonable size.

> Tap to click should _always_ be turned off; it's bad and it should feel bad

I love tap to click and it works great on my 2012 MacBook Pro trackpad.

However, on my brand new, expensive Dell Precision laptop from work, it's crap.

14 years after the introduction of the glass trackpads on the first unibody MacBook, I still haven't experienced a Windows or Linux laptop that comes close. Is it all due to patents?

Huh, the touchpad on my Precision 7540 is absolutely my favorite touchapd I've used in _years_.

Three (!) real, hardware buttons that I can feel _without_ activating. Sensitive area a bit larger than I can cover moving fingers without moving my wrist. Even barely-configured libinput drivers in Linux (I think I might have turned up the sensitivity a bit) haven't had any palm detection errors, moves-interperted-as-taps, taps-interpreted-as-moves, or any of the other behaviors that drive me nuts with big Apple-style clickpads.

I have fine motor control that is, at least, not worse than average.

I nonetheless have to turn off all the fancy "3d click" stuff on Mac trackpads, or else my click-drag-drop operations go from ~100% success to more like 40% success.

Took me a while to figure out WTF was wrong, the first time I got a Mac with that "feature". So please, no, no-one rely on this when writing software.

Tip-tap is great bettertouchtool gesture for switching tabs

Reply on news.ycombinator.com