No configurability

Posted Sep 25, 2014 6:37 UTC (Thu) by zdzichu (subscriber, #17118)
Parent article: Hutterer: libinput - a common input stack for Wayland compositors and X.Org drivers

Replacing middle button on Thinkpads with wheel emulation for the trackstick... breaks my workflow.
Such hardcoding is not reasonable - middle button is middle button.

No configurability

Posted Sep 25, 2014 23:19 UTC (Thu) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link] (6 responses)

and it still works as middle button so let's just stop the panic. wheel emulation doesn't kick in until after a timeout. and if you have a use-case that requires middle button hold-to-click or dragging, I'm all ears, just send me an email, or even better to wayland-devel.

No configurability

Posted Sep 26, 2014 1:30 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

>middle button hold-to-click or dragging
I've been using it for window dragging.

So please, make the touchpad configuration available. It's not reasonable to hide it. Even such fascist OSes as Mac OS X allow to configure touchpad.

No configurability

Posted Sep 27, 2014 5:07 UTC (Sat) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

>I've been using it for window dragging.

That, and I've been using it for the in-page scroll feature browsers have had for the past, oh, 15 years or so...

No configurability

Posted Sep 26, 2014 2:58 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link] (3 responses)

Off the top of my head: Gimp image panning. It's not quite the same as scrolling from a touchpad or mouse wheel--I tend to use a mix of both when I'm editing photos.

But that's nothing. I remap my Macbook's touchpad to behave like a standard PC laptop, using some of the useless bottom-row keyboard keys as buttons, disabling multi-finger gestures to prevent accidental scrolling when something brushes across the twelve-square-inch area, and using the bottom and right half inches of the device for scrolling on two axes. I remap my netbook's tiny touchpad area to behave like a Mac touchpad because multi-finger gestures for scrolling make sense on a device that is smaller than my thumb, while bottom- and side- scroll areas do not. Both of these can be expressed as Synaptics configurations on any suitably capable hardware (with a little bit of X keyboard to get the middle and right buttons on the Mac) and there have been several quite usable and effective configuration tools for these devices when FDO isn't intentionally breaking them.

Neither touchpad is usable in its default configuration. The Mac can't reliably position clicks with middle or right buttons using the touchpad, and dragging is impossible. Both devices send large scroll events at random when they detect a stray finger brushing against them in the wrong place or time. To understand what this is like, connect a second keyboard to your computer and have someone press PageUp and PageDown rapidly and randomly, but only at the most inconvenient times for you.

libinput is a non-starter until it can configure a Synaptics device. They are everywhere, and hardware vendors make terrible choices when they configure them. There's no excuse for not being able to configure such a common device properly.

No configurability

Posted Sep 26, 2014 4:19 UTC (Fri) by whot (subscriber, #50317) [Link] (2 responses)

just to doublecheck: you're using the middle button under the trackstick (which iirc only exists on lenovos) to pan images in GIMP? because that's what we're talking about here, so I need to make sure.

No configurability

Posted Sep 26, 2014 4:47 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yes, that's a common use-case. I'm using it (when working on my Lenovo laptop) to move windows by clicking at any point on them.

No configurability

Posted Sep 26, 2014 15:21 UTC (Fri) by zblaxell (subscriber, #26385) [Link]

Absolutely. The dedicated hardware middle button is why I bought Lenovo.

Even left+right middle-click emulation isn't good enough for some work. I configured the non-Lenovos using their keyboards to emulate the missing button(s). I even bind a key to left-click with the keyboard on the Mac because clicking on the trackpad causes a small jog in the pointer position.

I also threw in a few other cases where inadequate configurability ruins the end-user hardware experience. Most of these are Synaptics devices, which seemed worth talking about because the OP really seems to have a hate on for those.