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Comment by someonebaggy | Hacker News Reader

Here's another thing that's just completely ignored: touchpad as anything other than a mouse replacement. It's possible for a touchpad to allow things like pinch-to-zoom, but nobody's really doing that. You could even use it as a low res painting tablet.

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Well, Apple is doing it. The touchpad experience on macbooks is really on another level than all other laptops and one of the main reasons that's keeping me there.

It's a gimmik

How is the primary way of interacting with your computer being good a gimmick?

I try to use my partner’s windows laptop and it’s borderline unusable for me. She only almost uses it with a mouse plugged in. Meanwhile I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone plug in a mouse to a MacBook that wasn’t docked to a monitor and keyboard.

Pinch to zoom and two finger scrolling work well for me in most Windows apps. Apple has a few touchoad gestures that I don't believe have equivalents elsewhere, but they would be pretty neat.

The main issue with going beyond the mouse is that it involves changes across the event handling stack. For track pads, you have to build multi-touch infrastructure up ro a point and then there is a decision: what are gestures that are handled at a desktop level? What are gestures that get converted into semantically similar events (e.g. tap->LMB click)? What gets passed through as multi-touch? This ends up touching a lot of parts of the desktop software stack and the amount of required buy in to get this done on Linux seems massive.

Then change the stack. We can't be stuck on obsolete inefficient mental models. We are programmers, we can change software to fit new requirements. We already found ways to deliver keyboard input to the focused window.

I guess one problem is that the capability of touchpads really varies. Not all of them support recognizing multiple touch points for example.

And the original UX issue is much easier solved by bringing a mouse with your laptop.

> And the original UX issue is much easier solved by bringing a mouse with your laptop.

... or using an Apple laptop. The one thing they haven't broken yet is that their machines are perfectly usable without a mouse.

Of course, the argument is weakening with every recent OS release, since they try to make it useless in other ways.

Pinch-to-zoom is handled by libinput, and exposed to gtk apps. Works fine in firefox. Works in GtkWebkit views. works in Loupe the image viewer. works in Gnome Maps. Even works in Emacs, ffs.

Are you on X or smth?

I have no idea why you've been downvoted? Touchpad pinch-to-zoom has worked out of the box for years now (and also works fine on X11, also).

I'm actually on a desktop without a touchpad.

I don't understand your initial comment at all, then. You want touchpads to have features they already have, which you haven't tried, because you don't have a touchpad?..

Or was there a different meaning?

You understand that I can understand that parts of the system I don't personally use right now have issues right? Like I don't use systemd, because it sucks, but I can still say systemd sucks.

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