Comment by dsego
10 months ago
I think people give up too easily when they have to unlearn old habits. I've been using the macbook trackpads for over a decade now and it's more comfortable than a mouse. Just the fact that I can zoom in and freely scroll left and right makes all the difference compared to a mouse, so even when I use an external mouse with the laptop on a stand I reach for the trackpad for the gestures. It's like an extension of my mind at this point. And one technique that is not immediately clear is that to drag things you can click with one finger and drag with another, eg click on the icon with the index finger and then move it with the middle finger, easier than pushing the index finger around while keeping it depressed.
Regarding dragging, macOS also has an "accessibility" option to drag with three fingers. (It used to be a regular trackpad setting.)
It is a rather obscure feature, and yet it has such a dedicated following (me included) that a re-implementation of it was recently merged into libinput. The downside is that tap-and-drag is disabled when three-finger dragging is enabled, which makes it a bit harder to go back and forth across operating systems.