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 😭😭
wait until you find out what happens when you drag your sack across it.
Wait until I blow your mind and tell you about 3 finger drag.
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.
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
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
Ctrl/cmd + f
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.
But the bigger the text file, the more aggressive tiny scroll bar moves become. I can’t see anything if I try to use that method in a document too large. It scrolls too fast.
Options are good.
tbf, Microsoft keeps fucking with my mouse drivers so the scroll wheel is erratic
And three fingers tapping is often a middle-click or wheel-click, which is often a shortcut for ‘open in new tab’ while browsing the web. On some linux systems it is also a shortcut for paste if in a text input field.
Middle click isn’t a shortcut for paste in Linux, it’s what Unix had before cut-copy-paste was invented.
Highlighted text will be stored in what’s called the Primary Buffer. This is separate from the “clipboard.” Middle clicking in a text entry field will insert the highlighted text. No action needs to be copied. Watch, on a linux system:
Open a GUI text editor. kwrite, gedit, libreoffice, whatever.
Highlight and Ctrl+C this text: This text was stored in the clipboard.
Simply highlight this text: This text was stored in the primary buffer.
click in your text editor and middle click. Then hit enter for a new line, then hit Ctrl+V. Neat, huh?
I’m glad you know it now because its so helpful! These have been around 17 or so years I believe.
Pretty sure my Lenovo had this in 2003, lol.
It depends on the laptop and which touchpad they use.
Thinkpad nipple gang RISE UP!
It’s called “the clit”.
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.
Even the “buttonless” trackpad is better, than just fingertapping (I used to have so many misclicks).
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
That’s how you right click on a Macbook.
“secondary click” i have found unassigned in many a Mac. Like either they have been upgrading and using migration assistant to new machines, or it wasn’t a default when they got the machine somehow. Telling someone to two finger tap vs double tap sometimes gets confusing as well so I write it as ctrl click for Mac users
Could be others too, depends on the touchpad drivers
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.
Yeah the “guess where the clickable zone is” trend from smartphones turns out to actually not be that good. Multi-touch is a billion times better. There’s a reason it’s the default on Macs.
Mac trackpads are sooo fucking nice. I’ve used some very premium windows laptops, but nothing compares to how well Apple does it. Hate to shill, but it’s completely honest
Even the most diehard Apple haters I’ve encountered will readily admit that Mac trackpads are the shit. It’s not even an opinion it’s just a fact
At least on smartphones there’s some actual indications where it expects the zone to be. The touchpads with zero markings or boundaries to feel where the zones intended to be ‘middle click’ or ‘right click’ is just an absolute rough guess…
For people using gnome: you can swipe to the side with 3 fingers to change to other workspaces, and you can swipe down with 3 fingers for the equivalent to pressing the windows button or hitting the hot corner
Can you sell workspaces to me?
I never understood the benefits compared to just alt-tab
I use them for separating different activities, just as some form of organizing my mind. For example, if I’m writing some document, I keep everything related to it in a workspace. If I need to pause and do something else, I swap to another workspace. But it’s just a personal thing in the end, if you find alt+tab sufficient to organize yourself, it’s fine
I never understood the benefits compared to just alt-tab
I use it daily and I would be so pissed if it went away.
I work in IT and often times when I’m working on something (with multiple windows / apps open) somebody knocks at my door or calls my phone or messages me on outlook / teams and needs me to do a thing or help with a problem, which more often than not also means I’ll be opening another X windows / apps.
Many times I just couldn’t find the specific window / app anymore, which I was searching for at this moment, because there were so many things open on my desktop.
Now I have a simple rule: 1 workspace = 1 task
I work on something and have X windows / apps open on a workspace, someone tells me to look at problem X, I instantly switch to a different, empty workspace and use that. It’s like “grouping” windows / apps together. It’s especially helpful because a lot of my tasks run in a browser or terminal and I don’t want to alt-tab through X browser- or terminal-windows just to find the correct one.
Sometimes I look at my colleagues desktop with 30+ windows open on 1 workspace, struggling to find the window he’s looking for and I am sooooo glad I’m not like this anymore. He’s using mac and opening the overview / expose (or whatever you call it) and every window is so tiny, I’m having a hard time making out which is which.
I see the benefit. For example if I have to keep a window open just so it is open. But I don’t need to look at it. For example when opening a VM that I’m going to access via SSH.
In that case it’s useful so it is open but nowhere to be seen.
On the other hand, setting up the thing, and later remembering that I have it in case I want to manually close it is a hassle. So it’s just easier to not use the workspaces and just have it minimized. It’s going to be on the far side of the alt-tab queue anyway.
I tried it a few times and it didn’t fit well.
A colleague of mine uses it extensively.
In both our cases, it was KDE.
Three fingers up on GNOME I use a lot when I’m on my laptop. On desktop I’ve bound an extra mouse button to that action that I use a lot also.
In this case “T” means “twenty-years-ago” for me :D
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
This is the only way on chromebooks
Swipe with 2 fingers to scroll. Or scroll using one edge.
Depends on the touchpad
Yes! That one I know because a friend showed me. I really should start RTFM on these things, the QOL improvements are crazy good!
