Quick note: I initially tried to keep the intro short, but quick history of touchpads ended being not … so quick. This post thus mostly talks about quick history of touchpads, available options and why you might want to get one.
Despite being in just about every laptop, touchpads seem to be a very neglected piece of hardware that nobody seems to use if they don’t absolutely have to. And I sorta get it: even as recently-ish as 10 years ago, touchpads were outright terrible. They often didn’t support gestures beyond two finger scroll (or dedicated scroll area at the edge) — and forget about double tapping to right click, or triple-tapping to middle click. They also tended to be small. This meant that if you had to move your mouse cursor from one end of the screen to the other … well, you’ve got roughly two choices:
- Move the cursor 10% of the way across the screen, lift the finger and move it back to the other side of the touchpad where you started, move the cursor a little bit again, repeat
- Set mouse sensitivity and/or mouse acceleration so impractically high you wouldn’t be able to hit those buttons.
Synaptics — one of the more famous names in the touchpad business back then — was aware that both options sucked, big time. Thus, a handy feature was born: coasting. If you moved your finger across on the touchpad, the cursor would continue to move even after you lifted the finger — until you stopped the slide by tapping or moving your finger.
Fortunately, the multi-touch innovation in the world of mobile phones (started with the first iPhone in 2007) eventually ended up trickling down to touchpads as well. We started getting bigger touchpads with multi-touch support — big enough that cursor coasting was no longer necessary for most people.
Depending on what make of laptop and operating system you have, touchpads are still cancer to use. Asus, for example, did not include a way to disable “natural scrolling1which is a retarded feature that should have never existed — but just like every step back Apple “innovated,” others were soon to copy. Removal of 3.5mm audio jacks is possibly the worst trend to date. ” You could, of course, download an updated touchpad driver which provided more options — but the next Windows update will just revert to the previous, useless driver.
This — as well as the fact that most people are used to using a mouse — probably contributes a lot to why touchpads are rarely seen on desktop. A year and a half ago, there were only two-ish viable touchpad models for the desktop that you could throw your money at. One was Apple’s trackpad for waaay too much. The second, more reasonably priced option, was some JellyComb model for about €50 from German amazon.
Back at the time, I was struggling with wrist pain while using the mouse for about two weeks. I quickly learned that touchpads are great for avoiding wrist strain. I promptly ordered two, as I really don’t want to develop a carpal tunnel.
As you look at the picture above, you might notice a few potential problems with that touchpad models. Most notably, there’s some unneded buttons that you could press by accident. You could disable those, but the button that toggled extra buttons on or off was itself very easy to press by accident. USB-micro connector on the touchpad was also pretty fragile, so both touchpads got broken in less than two years. I attempted to re-soldier, but failed miserably. I had to get new touchpads.
The new models are better: the entire touchpad is a button that you can click and it doesn’t have any soft buttons. But as I started to re-adapt myself to the touchpad life, I really started to miss cursor coasting (and scroll coasting). My main monitor is 34″ (ultrawide), with an extra monitor on either side … Needless to say, there’s no touchpad big enough for that.
State of drivers on Linux
The first thing that I tried to do was to turn on coasting in touchpad settings. But I was in for a rude surprise: there is no coasting option in the driver.
Why isn’t there a coasting option in the driver?
Because Synaptics driver has been deprecated for years and replaced by libinput, and libinput is hot trash. Of multi-touch gestures, it only supports two-finger scrolling, two-finger tap and three-finger tap. If your touchpad supports click, your choices for right-click strategy are “two finger click” or “click in the lower right corner” — pick one. (If I had the chance, I’d enable both of these at once. In some situations, two-finger click is better than clicking in the lower right corner. In others clicking in lower-right corner is preferable — e.g. if you try to drag something with right click).
There is a third alternative: mtrack. Mtrack is great. It mitigates a lot of xinput shittines, but it comes with its own set of downsides. The original repository appears to be unmaintained for the past five years. There’s plenty of unsolved issues and pull requests that await merge or any sort of decision. If you want the most features out of it, it’s best bet is to find an alternative fork. Of those, p2rkw’s branch seems to be the most promising one, with most features and best documentations.
Then there’s configuration: you pretty much have to configure the driver with xinput and a xorg.conf.d file, which is … less than ideal.
But for the price of being a major pain in the ass to setup, you do get some benefits. If your touchpad can be clicked like a button, then you can set mtrack to ignore finger movement when you’re clicking the touchpad on the bottom end. It allows you to both reserve bottom right corner for right click, while still maintaining ‘click with two fingers elsewhere to right click’ functionality. It even allows for scroll coasting (but not cursor gliding), but … it kinda sucks. Scrolling appears to go haywire if you start scrolling before the scroll coast has ended. Duration of the scroll coast is also fixed: it always coasts for 5 seconds, regardless of how fast you scrolled.
I obviously don’t like that. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to do anything about it. The common mantra in open source world is that “if you don’t like it, do something about it” — and given you’re getting software for free, that seems a reasonably fair deal. The problem is, of course, that not everyone can write software. Even among programmers, not everyone has the experience to write everything. I know jack shit about drivers and the last time I used C (which is what the drivers use) was 4 years ago at the uni.
This means that I don’t really have the qualifications for writing a driver, so I can forget about doing things with mtrack. But with a very limited knowledge of C, I might be able to cobble something up in a different way …