Touchpads in your Gentoo install...do you use?

eccerr0r

Not sure but it seems that tuning ones touch pad to work exactly how you want it to work is kind of tough. It almost seems that Windows works better? Anyway how do people use their touch pads (synaptics, alps, whatever)?

Any tips on making it work the way you want it to work? I usually can use my touchpad but sometimes end up resorting to the buttons when I need to click, mainly when I try to tap to click, I move the pointer off the hot spot! Argh! Even worse on my i5 laptop that has a integrated button (the place you touch determines which event (left click, right click, etc.) gets sent.) Frustrating galore.
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Goverp · Advocate Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 2198

IIRC mine's a synaptics touchpad; I voted for the first option, as I use two-finger scrolling all the time, but only ever click with the buttons.
I presume it's Microsoft being screwy that inverts the direction of two fingers on Windows compared with Linux. Just another reason not to use Windoze.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 9328

Somehow the Alps touchpad in my HP Folio G1 works just fine out of the box (tapping, all kinds of gestures).

What does not work all that well is palm detection.

eccerr0r · Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2019 12:08 am Post subject:

The two finger scrolling should be translated to button 4/5 which are the scroll wheel buttons. The direction is software controllable and it's because it just so happens that the wheel direction for a touch pad is different than the intuitive direction for touch screens... more annoying things to take into account! :(

Yes the palm detection leaves much to be desired, as well as at least on HP laptops there's a hot spot on the touchpad you can double tap to disable/enable it in windows, and an LED tells when it's disabled... not sure what it'd take to port that over but suspect as with any driver, probably would take reverse engineering effort...

Also another software thing... I have another old laptop with a tiny touchpad (when they first came out they were tiny!), it seems the libinput driver, regardless of whether the touchpad was sold with the "feature", has right hand side scrolling (one finger scroll) - which is really hard to do on these tiny touchpads because if you're off a bit, you'll just move the pointer. And of course these old touchpads do not support tap to click...
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rpruen · Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2019 8:43 am Post subject:

I select the second option because I don't like the gestures support in the touchpad. It could be better at figuring out that some other part of my hand has come into contact with the touchpad, or like my old laptop turn the touchpad off while typing.

It took a bit of effort to learn to tap right, and to set up the touchpad. Equal measures of both I guess.

The touchpad is capable of multi touch, but I guess I cant be bothered to set it up / learn new tricks.

Regards

Richard

C5ace · Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2019 9:03 am Post subject:

I only use the keyboard and mouse. Touchpad is disabled.
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fedeliallalinea · Posted: Sat Aug 17, 2019 11:43 am Post subject:

Touchpad when I'm not at my desk, alternatively external mouse
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eccerr0r · Posted: Sun Aug 18, 2019 10:38 pm Post subject:

I still use the touchpad even when I have a mouse readily available on my laptop, except if I need to do some stuff that requires some accurate pointing and non-button1 click drags...
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miket · Posted: Mon Aug 19, 2019 3:03 am Post subject: "other"

The poll needs an other option. I avoid the touchpad on my laptops except for scrolling, where I'm more than likely to drag along the right or bottom edges of the pad than to use the two-finger salute. For all other mousey input I use the Trackpoint.

Corollary: if the laptop doesn't have a trackpoint, I don't buy it.

Ant P. · Watchman Joined: 18 Apr 2009 Posts: 6920

Sometimes I'll use the touchpad on my PS4 controller because the scroll wheel on my mouse is just awful.