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 😭😭
That’s how I like to do your Mom also.
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.
Three fingers for middle click. Four fingers to make it squirt.
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.
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…
middle-click, which isn’t a terribly-common operation in Windows
I use middle click constantly on every OS
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.
The whatpad now?
I think the fanfics on that site have been getting worse as of now, might be a matter of taste though.
This is the only way on chromebooks
sometimes it does not work but its so much easier I always try it first for a few times.
usually you can also double tap then hold to do a click and drag if you didn’t know that
In this case “T” means “twenty-years-ago” for me :D
Thinkpads got it right with the physical mouse buttons above the touchpad.
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😏.
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.
I really wish they would quit putting physical buttons under touchpads. Separate buttons are actually still useful. Putting them underneath interferes with the use of both the touchpad and the buttons.
Every touchpad I’ve ever used where the whole thing was a physical button, pushing it hard enough to click it would squish my finger skin enough to move the mouse pointer a little.
On tasks as basic as web browsing, where things like hyperlinks are actually quite small on the screen, that was often enough to move the cursor off the link. Or moving a volume slider, the process of letting go of the button would slightly move the cursor.
I like buttons on top of the touchpads, but that really only happens when they feel like they are doing buttons for a trackpoint instead of from the pad.
So still buttons, just not on the very bottom edge.
But even then, they keep deciding the touchpad is good enough to be buttons for the trackpoint, because I suppose people demand as large a trackpad as possible.
Learning this the hard way made me feel old :P
Wait until I blow your mind and tell you about 3 finger drag.
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 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.
