Comment by legitster

10 months ago

...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.

I'm not familiar with all of the trackpad gestures, but that's part of my big frustration with macOS in general - discoverability absolutely sucks. Half of the stuff I need to do is hidden behind a set of arcane keystrokes that I am apparently supposed to memorize.

13 comments

legitster

Reply
alabastervlog  10 months ago

> ...unless that intent is to right click something. In which case I have to move across the vast expanse of trackpad to find the secret magic area on where it lives.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't disbelieve you, I just don't even know what you're trying to do. It must be a feature I've never attempted to use.

I just click with two fingers, anywhere. Boom, right click. Didn't even know there was another way.

  • legitster  10 months ago

    Bottom right corner there's a hidden area for right clicking.

    I never use the two finger click. I am particularly uncoordinated always end up moving the cursor and miss the target. Maybe it's just not for me.

    • moltopoco  10 months ago

      Everybody has different trackpad habits and they can be hard to put into words. For example, trackpads used to have buttons at the bottom, and you'd naturally use your fingers for pointing, and the thumb for clicking. Now the buttons are gone, and new users click with their index fingers, which can be tiring and inaccurate on some trackpads (especially older/cheaper mechanical ones).

      Right-clicking also has a history. Because Mac trackpads only had one button (unlike PC touchpads), the way to right-click was to point with either your index or middle finger (high precision), then put down the other of these two fingers on the trackpad while doing the thumb-click. It will not move the cursor, so there is no loss of precision. At least that's what I did for a long time. (Although I don't lose precision if I hold down two fingers and press with one of them either.)

      And it gets more confusing when Apple changes the defaults. They've flip-flopped between touch-to-click and press-to-click at least once. I'm not sure if using the bottom right corner was ever the default for right-clicks? And then they also removed the video clips that taught you some gestures in the system settings. And I think the whole "deep press" gesture is an anti-feature that only confuses people, the dictionary lookup used to be a three-finger tap and that was fine. But the Magic Trackpad 2 needed a headline feature, sigh.

      2 replies →

    • aikinai  10 months ago

      You can also enable tapping (for left and right clicks). If you’re not pushing the trackpad maybe you’ll have less issues with the cursor moving while you do it?

bitsailor  10 months ago

Settings -> Trackpad and it's all right there.

  • philistine  10 months ago

    Exactly. They’re complaining about the defaults, yet you’re on Hacker News where most people on here probably have the most cursed settings you can think of.