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Dan Harkless
Page created: September 19, 2018 [Site Map] |
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CSS Last modified: September 4, 2025 |
Well, it's been about a year; guess it's time for another blog post. 😅 Anyhow, while setting up my Dad's new laptop for him, after yet another bad experience with "tap-to-click", the following little take-off on a familiar quote from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" popped into my head:
Tap-to-click is a UI designed by an idiot,
Prompting sounds of fury,
Making a trackpad worse than nothing.
I have literally never used a trackpad set to the default tap-to-click mode without it registering clicks that I didn't intend. I don't know if there's something about the way I use touchpads that isn't within the "95th percentile", or if there's something unusual about the capacitance of my skin (I find capacitive touchscreens notoriously unreliable too), or what, but I know I'm not alone in finding touchpads utterly unusable with this default behavior. (To quote one poster to that linked Ars Technica thread, "I hate tap to click with the heat of a thousand suns.")
An early experience I had with this, and the worst one I ever had, was one time when I was using my friend's laptop while visiting him in Japan. While trying to accomplish something with Windows Explorer in a directory under C:\Windows, tap-to-click caused me to accidentally move one folder into another. For some reason Undo didn't work in this situation (I think it was a Windows ME machine; go figure), so all I could do was apologize and hope that the move wouldn't cause some failure down the road. As I was supposed to be the computer expert in the room, I felt truly awful that I'd accidentally messed up his system in some unknown way, thanks to this idiotic misfeature.
In any case, nowadays, even if I'm using someone else's machine (if they don't have a mouse), the first thing I have to do is turn off tap-to-click while I work on it. At least with modern systems it's generally no longer necessary to first go to the Synaptics website (after getting Internet access working, if necessary), find and download the driver, install, and configure it.
Woe unto you if you have to work on a non-modern system, since around the end of 2017, Synaptics stopped even offering their generic driver, apparently due to the discovery of a "debug tool" keylogger in it. HP has released patched Synaptics drivers for their systems, but Synaptics doesn't mention any other vendors having done the same, and it's unclear which, if any, of the different updates released by HP would work on a given non-HP system.
Once again, I have to blame Steve Jobs for his pioneeringly reductive "Any more than one mouse button is too many; in fact, even one is too many" and "Sleeker is always better" design philosophies. Even once the nightmarish tap-to-click behavior is turned off, having to press down on the pointing surface is ergonomically a disaster. One problem my parents face is that they don't keep their fingers still enough as they click touchpads, causing a high percentage of their clicks to not be registered as such, since the cursor moved.
While I don't have that problem, I do have to ask: do the idiots that want to take away discrete trackpad buttons somehow never select blocks of text or use drag-and-drop?? First off, it's hard on the finger and wrist to have to hold down the trackpad while scooting a finger across it (holding down hard enough to avoid any possibility of accidental button release), and what the heck do they expect you to do if you haven't yet dragged your cursor or icon all the way to its destination but you've run out of trackpad? With some trackpads, you can perform a little "Indiana Jones golden idol – sandbag swap"-esque maneuver to get a new finger holding down the integrated button at the opposite edge of the trackpad, ready to spring into action when you release the original finger, but man, that is slow and awkward as heck.
At least on my Dad's HP (which has an Alps touchpad rather than the once near-ubiquitous Synaptics), they've thought this through, and when you get to the edge of the trackpad with your finger, the icon or cursor continues to move slowly in the direction you were dragging, as if you were pointing that way with a joystick. However, aside from the slowness, precision dropping / selection-stopping is quite tricky after such a "momentum drag".
Please, manufacturers, for the love of all that is usable, GIVE ME BACK MY DISCRETE BUTTONS!!! Allow me to hold down the left or right button while I comfortably drag another finger across the trackpad as many times as is needed to get where I'm going. And yes, I need a real right button too; don't make me do some goofy gesture that results in false positives or false negatives some large percentage of the time (even though I'm relatively dextrous).
On macOS, I've now taken to using the great open-source program Karabiner-Elements to remap MacBooks' right-Command and right-Option keys to be left-click and right-click. The positions of those keys is quite awkward compared to real trackpad buttons, but it's far better than the default setup. And it was highly necessary to set this up on my Mom's MacBook Pro, since despite the laptop's very light usage, as the crappy Li-ion battery swelled with age, it crammed up against the back of the trackpad and robbed it of the ability to press down and click.
On my Dad's HP, using AutoHotkey, I was able to figure out how to similarly remap the right-Alt (not to be confused with Alt-right 😬) and Menu keys (don't even get me started about the uselessness of the latter before remapping, given that it doesn't act like a right-click where the cursor's pointing), but unfortunately, under Windows 10 at least, there are many situations where these ersatz buttons fail to function as such. So I'm still on the lookout for a (preferably free, ideally open-source) Windows program that works as well as Karabiner does on macOS for this purpose; suggestions are welcome.
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Dan Harkless
Page created: September 19, 2018 [Site Map] |
Validated HTML 5 +
CSS Last modified: September 4, 2025 |