This is so much easier than pressing hard on the bottom side of the touchpad why did no one tell me this was a thing 😭😭
It’s been on Apple products for a solid 20 years. On the PC side it totally depends on the hardware and drivers to support multi-touch
Synaptic started this, not Apples.
Every laptop I ever used had this, I’m still bewildered that people don’t know. I actually like touchpads because they give you a bunch of gestures a mouse just can’t
If the ergonomics weren’t complete dog shit I’d still be using the magic mouse to get the best of both worlds.
Such as?
Pinch to zoom on images and browsers, swiping left and right to go forward or back in a browser, switching virtual desktops
Ctrl+scroll wheel to zoom. Mine had additional buttons for back and forward, some have scroll wheels that can be clicked left and right. Virtual desktop I don’t use so dunno, but I think there’s a quick keyboard shortcut.
Yep, the mouse needs the keyboard for most of those.
You have your hand there pretty much by default. If you’re doing anything you’re using it for shortcuts anyway.
I’m not sure why you’re being down voted. My left hand basically never leaves the home keys in a keyboard / mouse setup and I use various left hand + mouse combos to achieve all these things.
I fucking hate touchpads and if I do use a laptop undocked I’ll generally disable the touchpad when the mouse is plugged in.
They’re useful tricks if there’s no mouse available of course. To each their own I suppose.
Switch desktops? I can’t think of many that a mouse can’t do that I actually use.
Pinch, three (or four, although I don’t really like them) finger swipes, less awkward edge-gestures (the alternative to which is the “move mouse against display edge”), to name a few
I think the two finger right button tap has been there on all PC laptops I’ve used since the early 00s, even the lower mid range ones. Most of them have supported two finger scrolling anywhere on the trackpad but a few only did one finger along the edges like the 90s, along with customizable corners and zones and whatnot. Gestures and three finger tap for middle button or other functionality though was random until mid 2010s when it too was widely supported. That is, if we are speaking brand laptops and not junk OEMs or low end garbage.
I’m glad you know it now because its so helpful! These have been around 17 or so years I believe.
wait until you find out what happens when you drag your sack across it.
Thinkpads got it right with the physical mouse buttons above the touchpad.
Bring back the nipple! (xkcd 243)
It left? Mine’s got one and it’s fairly recent.
You’re growing nipples?
No, I’m rubbing them😏.
I got a ThinkPad this year with one
Got mine last year I think… A p16s gen3 for reference.
Thinkpad nipple gang RISE UP!
It’s called “the clit”.
Even the “buttonless” trackpad is better, than just fingertapping (I used to have so many misclicks).
Oh man, my first laptop,
300 ish MHz thinkpad 600600 ish MHz thinkpad t20(ish). Man I loved that thing. Bought it with no hard drive, didn’t know about bootleg windows, so I learned Linux. DSL, in fact. Those were the days.Edit:
I’ve been trying to remember what exactly it was, I noticed the 600 has the drive on the front but mine was definitely on the side.
Best I can tell, I think it was a T20, not a 600. They look very similar.
Um, that’s in the settings. Does nobody else obsessively adjust every setting when they get a new device? Just me?
I usually read the full manual too
I even what adjust settings I don’t understand m sometimes I learn what it does. Sometimes I don’t. I don’t always liked making what it does
Wait until you realize you can smooth scroll with 2 fingers.
The amount of laptop users I see using a mouse to scroll webpages is exhausting. And I don’t mean the mouse wheel, I mean clicking and holding the down arrow in the browser.
I have colleagues that keep dragging the little block in the sidebar.
Hey, sometimes the scroll bar is better. Like when you’re looking at a mile-long document and looking for the one part you care about
Wait until you hear about the key “Next Page”
edit : it is indeed PageDown
My American keyboard has a “page down” key? It’s still slower than the scroll bar sometimes. Seriously, sometimes I scroll through a multi-MiB text file.
That is significantly easier, more accurate, and somehow faster than the arrow.
Believe it or not, those scrollbars used to be way bigger, not autohide, and look solid and three dimensional. I miss those days.
I hate that they auto hide. I have turned that feature off in the past.
Truly a terrible design philosophy that has been forced on everybody
tbf, Microsoft keeps fucking with my mouse drivers so the scroll wheel is erratic
usually you can also double tap then hold to do a click and drag if you didn’t know that
Wait until I blow your mind and tell you about 3 finger drag.
Framework laptops do this. Double finger tap is right click, triple finger tap is middle mouse button
Most laptops do this IIRC (don’t use them much lol) Asus and Dell too at least, I’m pretty sure.
Wait until you realise you can side scroll, go backwards, change desktop, use the application switcher!
I use a dedicated track pad on my desktop PC instead of a mouse, specifically because of that stuff! Unless you’re playing an FPS game or something, mice are just so kludgy and limited by comparison!
That’s what I am always saying. But then people look at me like I am crazy. I don’t even own a mouse and haven’t missed one ever
Three fingers for middle click. Four fingers to make it squirt.
In this case “T” means “twenty-years-ago” for me :D
Learning this the hard way made me feel old :P
Depends on how you configure it. There are a whole bunch more settings. The options you’ve discovered are tap-to-click and two fingers for rightclick. See this here: https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/latest/configuration.html
