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 😭😭
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 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.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.
This is the only way on chromebooks
Wait until I blow your mind and tell you about 3 finger drag.
usually you can also double tap then hold to do a click and drag if you didn’t know that
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.
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
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the company actively hostile to power users
He’s out of line, but he’s got a point
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two fingers to right click has been on literally every Windows or Linux touchpad enabled device I’ve ever encountered.
Sounds like you haven’t been playing with computers very long cause it took almost a decade for Linux and Windows to add that. It wasn’t added till Windows 10, and Linux added synaptics drivers maybe a year before M$.
Like yeah synaptics had drivers or in 2007 ish but it wasn’t on every machine
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My Lenovo did all this in 2003.
It’s mostly driven by the brand of touchpad and their drivers, not windows.
Ah but those Mac trackpads feel so nice. Still wouldn’t choose one over my ThinkPad but I’ve never used one I liked better than that on a Mac.
Unix with a solid GUI on top
Automation built into the GUI, with a dedicated language or accessible via the API.
Thousands of third-party utils to tweak the UI, including tons of open-source ones because programmers love Mac for the Unix. Including stuff like Hammerspoon and Alfred, the likes of which Linux users have never seen.
“the company actively hostile to power users”
Apple haters are like a broken record.
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the fact you have to use “thousands of third-party utils to tweak the UI”
What, like when you have to have a program or a widget in Linux or Windows to do some UI stuff? Which program might not be there out of the box? Idk why it’s such a difficult concept for Mac haters that when you have an app doing some UI tweaks, it’s the same thing in every OS. Mac UI is just conservative by itself, the same way as some Linux GUIs are barebones — which is somehow paraded as great success by Linuxoids but is looked down upon when Mac is doing it.
or use hammerspoon or Alfred instead of having options
You don’t “have” to use Hammerspoon or Alfred, but you can use them to do advanced stuff. Which you can’t do in Windows or Linux, because there’s nothing quite like these apps there. Alfred has some feeble analogues, while there’s bupkis like Hammerspoon aside from Autohotkey for Windows with its shitty 80s-style language and limited abilities. The fact that there isn’t a Hammerspoon-like app for Linux is a travesty, considering Linux users go on all day long about how it’s customizable and caters to power users. And by the way, if you look at Hammerspoon and Alfred and don’t know why you might want to use them, you’re not a power user.
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a strawman about windows/Linux needing 3rd party apps as well is just silly
You’re right here. Windows now needs third-party apps to remove “features”, not to add them. That’s the biggest difference between Windows and Mac these years. As for Linux, it always was and remains a toss-up as to whether the widget you want is installed, so I don’t see the fucking distinction. It’s not like Linux has every widget under the sun installed by default, is it? That would be pure madness.
Again, I invite you to look into Hammerspoon and Alfred for what UI interaction could be like, if you have even the slightest scripting chops. For example, my Android phone could hand off the Bluetooth headphones via the Automate app to the Macbook or vice versa, via drop-down widgets on the phone or a custom command on the laptop. With Linux, I have to kludge up my own endpoints with an Nginx webserver, no less, with barely any desktop APIs available through the command-line.
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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?
On macOS you can do all kinds of crazy shit with gestures. Using a mouse feels very obsolete and slows everything way down.
Such as?
Basically anything…they work similar to keyboard shortcuts.
I remember having a four finger click(not tap, that’s a different gesture) to lock my machine when I was using a MacBook at work.
Show/hide desktop, open window manager, open app drawer, scroll in all 4 directions, zoom in and out, you can press and then press harder for more functions sometimes
Most of those I do with a keyboard trivially. Personally, I don’t see the benefit. Keyboard shortcuts are superior 99% of the time, and KDE supports mouse gestures as well (though I don’t use them), so you don’t even need a track pad for most of them.
Switch desktops? I can’t think of many that a mouse can’t do that I actually use.
- two finger swipe
- three finger swipe
Pinch zoom is still handy and less so, but occasionally twisting gestures as well.
I still use the fan out gesture to see the desktop after taking screen grabs out of habit too.
Scroll wheel and alt tab?
Yeah, two finger scrolling seems quite universal. Three fingers switch between virtual desktops on my system (Gnome).
It can also trigger overview if done upwards
On kde you need 4 fingers for that instead of 3 for some reason
I’ve that on super/window key, probably faster if you have the key and a flexible thumb.
Your mouse has alt and tab keys?
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.
There are some gestures you can perform on a touchpad, but not on a mouse, but KDE on Linux supports mouse gestures as well. I don’t think Windows, or even Mac, does though.
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.
The whatpad now?
I think the fanfics on that site have been getting worse as of now, might be a matter of taste though.
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”
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.
sometimes it does not work but its so much easier I always try it first for a few times.
Three fingers is typically—I mean, you can potentially rig a touchpad up for whatever—a middle-click, which isn’t a terribly-common operation in Windows, but is in Linux (to insert whatever is in the PRIMARY selection, which is typically text that one has selected), or to scroll something while dragging.
EDIT: IMHO, a touchpad with three physical buttons is preferable to multi-touch, though it costs slightly more. However, aside from some Thinkbook models that have a Synaptics touchpad, it’s uncommon as an integrated option in a laptop.
You can get external, USB-connected touchpads that have three physical buttons.
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On Windows middle click is used primarily for scrolling and tab operations. Linux has a second clipboard mapped there, plus it’s more heavily utilized in legacy apps since 80s-90s workstations had mice with three buttons while personal computers didn’t have a standardized third button until the wheel mouse became dominant.
a middle-click, which isn’t a terribly-common operation in Windows
Super useful in any browser, as it’s used to open a link in a new tab.
My old lappy had two physical buttons, which were right next to each other. So, if I enabled the option that left-click + right-click = middle-click, then I could just press in the middle where they were divided. I always really liked that, because it didn’t take space away from the other buttons.
Unfortunately, probably depends a lot on the build quality, whether you can actually press the buttons on their edges…
You can also three-finger tap the touchpad to perform a middle click.
Ooh, kinky.
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Just like using a regular fucking mouse normally
Nice, pulling bullshit out of your ass now because you must hate Apple at all times even for invented reasons, otherwise life isn’t worth living.
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Scroll wheels? What year is this?
Get yourself a Magic Mouse and don’t look back.
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Yeah, just as I wrote in another comment, you have the conservative default Mac UI, and you have a plethora of open-source third-party tweaks for it, same as with some Linux GUIs. Mac’s UI is solid and has excellent usability because it doesn’t expose hundreds of options to tweak every possible behavior. I derived no pleasure from wading through Windows’ control panel for hours in search of one or another option that I needed, and to my knowledge KDE’s approach is the same but on meth.
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One of my favorite customizations on Mac is enabling three finger drag in the Accessibility settings.
Yeah 3 finger drag is a game changer.
Also I like the ‘control+two finger swipe = zoom’ option in the accessibility settings. Really handy to quickly zoom in and out on something.
Three fingers for middle click. Four fingers to make it squirt.
That’s how I like to do your Mom also.
Thinkpads got it right with the physical mouse buttons above the touchpad.
I always preferred below since you could then use the thumb to click. Buttons built into the touch surface are worse than not having them at all, however.
Bring back the nipple! (xkcd 243)
It left? Mine’s got one and it’s fairly recent.
I got a ThinkPad this year with one
Got mine last year I think… A p16s gen3 for reference.
My 2023 Thinkpad has one
You’re growing nipples?
No, I’m rubbing them😏.
