Trackpad

May 8, 2012

Posted By:  AlfromRoke

6 Votes

Status: Acknowledged

Promote

As downvoting/disagreeing isn't possible I just wanted to submit a mostly opposite idea to one of the other idea's.

- No seperate buttons (as is the case on macbooks for example and the current xps 13), as this greatly increases the useable trackpad area.
- Two buttons at most (middle mouse button is /rarely used/).
- The bigger the better (trackpads are extremely useful when they get past a certain point where you can start using them as a one on one representation of the screen (rather than a relative moving device) which is incredibly useful in some applications).
- Two finger scrolling (or the circular scrolling which was popular on linux awhile ago) that actually works (I have seen a number of really really poor implementations)

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  • May 9, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: AlfromRoke

    @MilesGazic: As far as physical buttons go: check out the macbook air or dell xps 13, you simply can click the touchpad down in the bottem left and bottom right corner. The second thing you mention is a driver and OS thing and as long as you are using an emulator/ssh (which is the case 99% of the time when modern linux users are using the command line) you can quite simply add the necessary bindings if you require the middle mouse button (though I - and the few developers here at work - I have asked apparantly never use the middle mouse button except for scrolling (physical mouses)). The middle mouse button also takes precious space away from the left and right mouse button + it causes a lot of misclicks if you don't have physical buttons as a natural position of your hand on smaller notebooks often rests your thumb over both the left and middle part of the click area. (Oh, and if you are using it for scrolling then you simply never had the luck to use a good two finger scrolling implementation.)
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  • May 9, 2012     Comment Link

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    Posted By: MilesGazic

    How do you right-click and middle-click with no physical buttons?

    My laptop currently has two physical buttons, and I dual-boot between Windows 7 and Ubuntu.  Holding down two fingers and clicking in the trackpad region (not on the physical buttons) is cumbersome, but works as right-clicking in windows 7, however it doesn't work as right-clicking in Ubuntu.  I can't get middle-click to work in Windows 7 or Ubuntu!  For opening browser links in a new tab I've been resorting to right-clicking and using the "Open link in new tab" option, but in many terminals I don't know a menu option to paste, so I am unable to paste highlighted text.  In some apps ctrl-c/ctrl-x/xtrl-v work, but that's not standard for linux, so it's not supported in everything.

    I don't understand why you'd say "Two buttons at most".  How would it hurt you any if the middle button that I sorely need exists?  Just don't use it if you don't want to.