I literally just want a touchpad with buttons. These new 'clickpads' are the bane of my existence. They are so much slower, and certain workflows are impossible. I must use an external mouse now with modern laptops.
Why can no laptop manufacturer even make this an option?
Aside: what if frame.work site had a place for popular vote for features? (With proper registration, etc.) E.g. Digital Ocean has this, and it seems helpful, they follow up on some of the most upvoted feature requests.
It's sort of free market research.
Kickstarter style upfront payment may be more useful. You want touchpad with buttons; it would cost 300k to develop if enough people paid, the company would build it. If it is a niche, let open ecosystem take care of it.
Can only speak for myself, but for me the issue with traditional clickpads comes down to their mechanical diving board nature. Even the best ones are not nice to use due to the unavoidable variance in pressure and click feel across the pad that is exacerbated as the size of the pad increases and the mechanism wears over time.
The type that doesn’t move at all and simulates a click with haptics on the other hand I find just fine. MacBooks do this of course but there’s also a few x86 laptops equipped with pads like that.
So in my opinion, mechanical clickpads should disappear entirely and laptops should offer two options: a static haptic clickpad and traditional trackpad with buttons.
Honestly, I'm here half wondering why we need the click at all. One finger drag for move, quick one finger tap for left click, tap and half for click and drag, two finger tap, two finger drag for scroll covers all the common interactions.
Which isn't to say I don't use the click functionality at all. I will subconciously use it in some scenarios, but not in others, but if it were missing I would adapt very quickly, since I use the gesture alternatives so often, that I would automatically fall back to them.
I suppose I need the click for some obscure interactions like right click drag, but honestly except in games I've almost never seen that used. My surface laptop as currently configured literally wouldn't even allow some other rare ones like hold button and scroll (I'd need to turn on right side scroll-wheel for that) and I've never even noticed the absence of that ability until I tried it just now.
I've missed them every time I've been in the unfortunate position of dealing with someone else's macOS system. It's all a matter of what you're accustomed to.
Hardware-wise, no, I've had plenty of PC trackpads that are better than Apple trackpads. But MacOS tends to have better built-in support for advanced gestures, which seem to be impossible on Windows and must be manually configured on Linux (but gives you enormous power once you do).
Apple's palm rejection is also top tier, though other systems have been getting better. My current Dell seems fine so far, but at my last company the Dell I had was almost unusable due to my cursor just teleporting around my document randomly if my hands got too close to the trackpad (which is where they have to be to type).
Not sure if it's a hardware (Dell) or software (Ubuntu) improvement, but thank god.
You could try putting a trackpad from a macbook into the framework. AFAIK the palm rejection is all in the firmware. The apple trackpad is USB. If you look at the code for Asahi Linux it could tell you more.
... it's a software problem afaik. The trackpad may be slightly better quality, but it's the drivers and the OS integration that make even some games playable without a mouse on Mac OS.
Don't think any one x86 laptop manufacturer can fix it.
I assume some gestures are simply not possible. Like click-to-drag and scroll simultaneously. Not every app handles gutter-hover-to-scroll in a usable way. On a mouse or a pad with buttons, you can keep the left click held down and scroll with the wheel or gesture. Uni-pads make this impossible.
"Without issues" is a stretch. You need to use two hands or be skilled with one. Its trivial on a mouse or a pad with a discrete buttons.
But ok, what about just dragging a long distance where you would normally lift the mouse or finger? Is there some hidden gesture for this? Maybe once your initial drag finger hits the edge you need to use two more to do a move gesture? But I've seen that trigger scroll and/or pinch-to-zoom.
This reminded me of a feature in windows where if you were dragging something and reached the end of the touchpad, the cursor would continue on the same trajectory as long as you kept your finger at the edge of the touchpad. Then you could overshoot a little so you could bring your fingers back to the middle to regain maneuverability. I haven't missed it since I switched to linux but now that I'm thinking about it that was a very nice touch (no pun intended).
> what about just dragging a long distance where you would normally lift the mouse or finger?
This is why you set Trackpad speed to "fastest", and take advantage of the aggressive trackpad acceleration. When you move your finger quickly you'll easily reach the far side of the screen before your finger reaches the edge of the pad, and slow finger movements will still be precise
I'm probably missing some context, but on my Mac I'm using three fingers drag and I can lift fingers and (quickly) reposition them without breaking the drag.
I have the external apple trackpad (the most recent usb-c version at that) and this click-to-drag and then attempting to scroll does not work on Linux. Seems like this might have been a particular attention to detail on part of macOS devs.
As far as I know touchpad implementations just report finger locations and its up to software to interpret what a combination of these gestures means.
How does that work? You've got to tap the touchpad to trigger the initial click, don't you? For some reason, I really HATE tapping a touchpad (let that be an Apple or otherwise), it breaks my flow, I suppose? (like, you have to pause at the cursor's location, lift, tap twice to initiate a dragging event, then finally move on) whereas on the ThinkPad I daily drive I do all the cursor movement/scrolling with my right hand and the selection/clicking with my left thumb on the physical key that sits on the top of the touchpad sensitive area. That makes click&drag workflows super efficient, I find.
You click and drag with one finger and you are free to scroll with two other fingers during the drag. It is a multitouch gesture. (I don't use "tap to click" since I always found it cumbersome)
Just for me to understand, you navigate to that thing you want to drag, then press harder (without the double-tap+move in short sequence, do there's that), and that registers a drag event?
Could you do the "press harder" part with, e.g. a thumb in an other region of the touchpad instead of the finger that did the navigation?
Yes, you can. As long as one finger is "pressing hard-ish" a second finger can command the drag position, but if the finger that is pressing (you do not need to press very hard to trigger a click) is not the one that is also moving, then you will have issues when also scrolling with two other fingers, because at that point you have 4 fingers touching the trackpad, and by default you get anoter gesture registered (probably a zoom out to see all the windows in the workspace, called "expose"). If the fingers touching the trackpad are "only" three, you can drag and scroll, with the window that receives the scroll being the one under the pointer/item being dragged.
Thanks for clarifying, it seems analogous to having a physical mouse button, then (except that the haptic feedback is simulated, which strangely isn't off-putting to most, I've personally always felt the sensation uncanny)
> Why can no laptop manufacturer even make this an option?
Because it’s a variation of both the case and the internals that brings a higher failure rate, more dust ingress, more moving parts, and, most importantly, would rarely be chosen.
> They are so much slower,
They are objectively faster because you can click anywhere rather than moving a finger to a button or keeping one finger always on the button.
> They are objectively faster because you can click anywhere rather than moving a finger to a button or keeping one finger always on the button.
I have no problem with the current trackpad (and prefer it), but when I used a trackpad with dedicated buttons, i'd use my index finger to track and my thumb to click, so I wouldn't have to move my fingers around at all.
Regardless, why do we feel the need to argue with people's personal preferences? You don't have to agree with someone on this. It's fine. People can prefer other things.
This is my issue! All these years later, I am still not used to it, and I accidentally trigger multi-tap nonsense that I didn't intend because I am trying to click with my thumb.
My only point of reference is my MacBook Pro trackpad but I have no problem using my finger to move the cursor with my thumb resting on the trackpad and clicking. Not exactly the same because you lose some of the tactility of discrete buttons but it seems somewhat possible at least.
Yeah, most of the non-apple implementations of this don’t work with using a second finger to click in my experience. They expect you to click with the pointing finger.
Someone should scoop up the niche market of anguished ThinkPad devotees, with a TrackPoint and a good, non-chiclet keyboard. Maybe Framework, leveraging its modular system. Maybe a Framework-compatible third-party.
I just watched Framework's other video talking about what they're working on[1], and they mentioned they're trying to get the trackpoint working, but they're having issues with it damaging the screen due to the low clearance.
I think you're supposed to touch the touchpad in particular ways with your thumb, while using your index finger on the TrackPoint stick.
I wonder what the set intersection is, between people who want TrackPoint sticks, and people who don't want TrackPoint buttons.
ThinkPad industrial design the last several years seems focused on looking thin and sleek -- like an Apple product, only in matte black, with a red accent in the middle of the keyboard -- but some of the human factors changes aren't intuitive to me.
Current models of the X1 have the option of having buttons or not. Which seems fine, but hopefully it isn't a sign that they're trying to drop the option of buttons.
Some Dell business models have them as well... I used to be a fan, but at this point I prefer the Mac touchpad experience. The closest I've felt are Razor and a few higher end Chromebooks (that I won' t buy). I'm hoping other mfgs get a lot closer to the Apple touchpad experience as patents start to expire in the next few years.
There's a few that are close, but still not close enough. Also, Mac slightly changed their default settings (regarding the physical click behavior), I never recall what it is but only that I change it back when starting out on a new machine.
With the trackpads that have built-in clicks in the pad itself, I've always found it really difficult to drag-and-drop stuff if it has to be pulled longer than a few pixels. Just moving and pressing against a surface seems to not be a super accurate movement in general.
Although it gets buggier with every release, macOS has a three-finger-drag operation, and there's a grace period when you lift your fingers if you need to adjust your position over the trackpad. It also lets you just fling one finger.
I don't think I have, long time ago I had to use a laptop myself, just remember that being difficult last time I had to do it together with someone else. Probably depends on the software/hardware itself also, how well something like that would work.
Have you? The precision vs a touchpad with buttons isn't even close. It may well be a driver issue in Linux, all I know for sure is that it's an issue that does not exist with touchpads and that I have already spent far too much of my life fiddling with settings trying to get it to behave.
I never had problems with precision on HP high end models, Windows XP up to 2008 and several Ubuntu versions since then to 2022, then Debian.
I own an nc8430 and a ZBook 15 first generation. I use the lower row of three mouse buttons as left, middle and right click. Those touchpads don't move and don't bend. I disabled tap to click as buttons are much better and never move accidentally the pointer by design. Palm detection works very well, basically no issues. I use two finger scroll and pan. Several gestures work but I don't really like them. I disabled everything. I rather use keyboard shortcuts. I defined some of my own especially to navigate among virtual desktops.
There is still one ZBook Fury model with buttons, every other model lost them.
I have, yes! I do it a lot when dragging and dropping on Linux. Start the drag with one finger, and then bring a new finger in to move it. It's just like using a button.
I've not had to configure anything to make this work for a number of years now in Plasma. Though I've been running Linux on Macbooks for a long time, so maybe it's about specific hardware support.
While I prefer an external mouse, I can manage ECAD and some 3D modelling if I have buttons. It's great in a pinch. I'm getting nauseous even imagining it with a clickpad.
My current plan is to retrofit buttons to my clickpad. Earlier this week I ordered a few different styles of touchpad buttons from AliExpress to test. I'll build a custom little USB HID device for it once I've picked my favourite one.
I don't think I can rely on laptop manufacturers to buck the clickpad trend any time soon, so I'll do it myself.
> These new 'clickpads' are the bane of my existence.
But only because they are all worse than Apple's version. What you really want isn't a touchpad with buttons, is a "clickpad" that doesn't suck. And as far as I know only Apple makes them.
Why can no laptop manufacturer even make this an option?