On the touchpad is a more advanced input mode than the mouse

About half a year ago, I've been using the mouse. Later, because of the pain in the fingers, and often need to switch between the mouse and keyboard, so gradually began to try to use the touchpad instead of the mouse. Now I am completely no longer using the mouse, but all with the touch pad + keyboard work. In this process, I realized that in most cases, the touchpad is more convenient than the mouse, at least not worse than the mouse. So use this article to share with you the experience of this process.

How to input the Touchpad

First, let me introduce the input of the touchpad on my notebook computer. One is ThinkPad E330, it has three keys in front of the touchpad, roughly corresponding to the left and right mouse keys and rollers, and the touchpad itself can be pressed down, equivalent to the left-click. Another is the MacBook Pro, only the touchpad, no buttons around the touch pad itself can be pressed down.

My input on the ThinkPad is similar to the traditional mouse, where the movement of the finger on the touchpad is equivalent to the mouse movement, and clicking the button in front of the touchpad is equivalent to clicking the left and right button. And here is a very different, I no longer use the traditional way of the middle wheel, or the scroll bar left click and then drag the mouse, to achieve page scrolling. On the touchpad, scrolling pages are implemented with two-finger swipe.

The touchpad on your Mac supports more gestures. Including:

• Two-finger tap: Right-click
• Two fingers apart/closing: Zoom In/out
• Three-finger swipe: Move the mouse after pressing the left button (for example, dragging a window, or selecting text)
• Some gestures of four fingers: some special functions, such as calling up a panel, etc.

As you can see, the core advantage of the touchpad is that it supports multiple gestures. There are only four types of mouse input: Move, left, right, scroll. While the touchpad is capable of supporting single-fingered/two-finger/three-finger/four-finger move/TAP/close, the future can also support more complex gestures with more powerful recognition systems. Obviously, the touchpad supports much more input than the mouse in theory.

Advantage

In practice, the personal experience of the convenience of the touchpad is:

• No additional equipment is required. You must carry an external USB mouse with your mouse, and the touchpad itself is located on your computer. Not only convenient to carry, but also save a mouse of silver.

• Away from the keyboard near. Work often needs to switch between the mouse and keyboard, the distance from the USB mouse to the keyboard is obviously not near the touchpad. Reduces the movement distance between the hand and arm.

• Less effort is required to operate. The mouse itself has a certain weight, and we hold the mouse operation by hand, most of the weight of the hand will also be pressed on the mouse, and the common mouse bottom and mouse pad surface is often not smooth enough, resulting in a larger friction between the mouse and mouse pad. The resistance of the touchpad to sliding is only the friction between the tip of the finger and the touchpad, which is much smaller than the mouse.

  In addition, the mouse button is a mechanical structure, the click requires a certain force. When the touchpad clicks, it just needs to tap the touchpad, just like the phone's touchscreen, so it only takes a little effort. Of course, my ThinkPad is easy to operate by mistake, so turn off this function and switch to the three entities in front of the touchpad, which is just like a mouse.

• Two-finger swipe to scroll the page. Before scrolling the page, there are two ways: 1) The left mouse button to hold the scroll bar after the drag, this inconvenient is the first to the mouse pointer to the area is often not too large scroll bar, and then drag the track to basically keep round bow; 2) using the wheel, which does solve the problem of the previous way, But it caused my fingers to shrink and stretch, which was one of the important causes of pain in the finger joints, so I had to rotate the rest.

  While the two-finger sliding, equivalent to the wheel, the fingers do not need to use a lot of strength, but also do not need flexion and stretch.

  Of course, this is just a comparison between the touchpad and the mouse, with page up/down or spaces, not within the scope of the discussion.

• Can be operated with both hands. The mouse can only be operated with one hand, and the click and move are done by this hand. While the touchpad can be slid by one hand, the other hand clicks the button in front of the panel. In fact, I had to use two hands, because the distance between the panel and the front button, and the fingers of a hand can be flexibly separated from the distance, or larger, so with one hand at the same time sliding and button, is inconvenient.

  It's a matter of both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the two hand operation is more flexible than one hand and is more balanced to avoid damage caused by prolonged use of one hand. Disadvantages are said below.

Disadvantages

Of course, compared with the mouse, touchpad also has its shortcomings, and these shortcomings are mainly the impact on the game is relatively large.

• The above mentioned two-handed operation is also a disadvantage because the keyboard cannot be operated at the same time. Unlike a mouse, the mouse requires only one hand, so the other hand can operate the keyboard at the same time. This disadvantage for instant games , such as LOL, is deadly. So, when playing the game still need to use the mouse.

• and a touchpad like Mac that doesn't come with keystrokes has one obvious drawback, which is that it has only one input dimension. The mouse is not, its keys are separate, click and move can be independent, non-impact. While the touchpad can not be clicked when moving, when clicked, it can not be moved, which limits its input speed, obviously, or some of the higher requirements for APM game has a significant impact.

Summarize

In summary, in the case of not playing games, especially the daily work, the touchpad is more advanced than the mouse input method (especially for Mac users), it can achieve more features, more portable, but also more energy-saving, but also through the software extension to support more gestures.

The last bit of practical experience, since I gave up the mouse to use the touchpad, the finger especially the pain of the index finger greatly reduced.

On the touchpad is a more advanced input mode than the mouse