It's only natural on the actual display itself.
Anothe affront to nature by Apple, along with killing the headphone jack.
There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.
I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.
Yes, it’s less direct than touching the screen, but it makes more sense for the model of UI they’ve been going for over the last 20 years where the content of the window is more meaningful than the window itself, which is to say worrying about where the scroll bars are rather than what part of the document you’re looking at is what’s not natural.
Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?
Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.
Which is not natural. The manipulation of a trackpad matches the manipulation of a document, natural.
There's no real world concept of a 'viewport' that makes sense with documents other than our own eyes; we don't move our eyes with our hands, unnatural.
It's totally a matter of personal taste, both are objectively right depending on what one thinks the thing being manipulated is.
No, it doesn't. Trackpads always worked fine until "they" reversed the motion. Now it's always a guessing game for the initial scroll. It's terrible, unintuitive, and doesn't make sense. "Natural" is unnatural.
For whatever reason this persists to touchpads even though they would seem closer to a touchscreen.
- One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
- Two fingers down moves the cursor down through the text (moving the text up)
- Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text (and selects).
- One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
- Two fingers down moves the cursor up through the text (moving the text down)
- Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text and selects.
Disabling natural scrolling used to be the first thing I did on a new system. Until I once was too lazy to do it, got used to it, and now I can’t imagine ever going back.
But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because that feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document beneath, like a printer finishing a page.
Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.
No it isn't.
Both examples match perfectly physically:
- Touchpad is like dragging the piece of paper directly.
- Scroll wheel is like having the paper on the other side of the wheel.
In either scenario, “natural scroll” feels like you’re pulling on the surface which maps directly to sliding on the screen.
It makes less sense if you think about a wheel pulling the page beneath it.
While I have no idea who was, I do know that John Ousterhout's text editor and terminal emulators Mx and Tx used "natural scrolling", made pre-1989. Their scroll mechanism is shift + left/right click then drag, using "natural scrolling", e.g. push mouse up to scroll down. Left click scrolls normally, right click scrolls quickly.