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Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

I wish libinput gave the option for pointer inertia, where the pointer glides to a gradual rather than a hard halt after you stop moving it. I’m limited to a trackpad these days and it’s a really nice feature on my Steamdeck that I’d love to have on my Thinkpad.

Come to think of it, Steamdeck is Wayland? How do they implement it?

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>I wish libinput gave the option for pointer inertia, where the pointer glides to a gradual rather than a hard halt after you stop moving it

Why? That seems like it would make it a lot harder to move the cursor precisely. (in fact the main implementation of it on linux I know of was a joke in IOCC)

How precisely can you scroll on your phone? I don't think anyone finds it awkward.

I get the impression that you're thinking of a much jankier implementation of "inertia" than that, and to be honest I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we'd get anyway.

An unambitious inertia describes the linux community of the past decade pretty well.

It works similarly to the steam deck actually. You flick and then tap/hold to stop.

Does this mean the inertia only applies if you remove your finger at the end of the movement, and so non-flicky movements are interpreted normally, with the cursor stopping as soon as your finger stops? That implementation sounds a lot better than how I interpreted the original comment; I thought they meant it would apply to all movements, even when your finger stays down the whole time.

Yeah. It would only work on trackpads. It’s particularly good when you don’t have a massive MacBook style trackpad.

You'd think so but as the person above mentioned, this is how the steam deck/controller does it and it works well. It mostly affects faster movements like flicking the mouse across the screen, leaving smaller movements unaffected.

The opposite applies to my use. Humans are generally great at predicting where moving things will land - we evolved for that. It feels great flicking the cursor around and stopping it at the right point. It’s just like scrolling a list on your phone, I for one get great precision doing that. It’s especially great on small touchpads.

I highly agree. The synaptics driver on an Asus Eee PC I had had this feature and I really liked it. It just makes sense: It is a thing you touch and flick around. Having it immediately stop is like the list you’re scrolling immediately coming to a hard stop once you release the finger.

> How do they implement it?

In firmware.

Semi-related - I think that controllers would be a very nice single input device for many kinds of workloads, especially if you can occasionally just dictate text. It's kind of sad that it's not supported all that well.

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