The trackpoint alone makes a thinkpad so comfortable to accurately and quickly get a lot done on for mouse workflows when no external mouse is attached, that nothing else comes close.
Especially in a bouncing moving vehicle. I find touchscreens(phones) and the trackpads nearly unusable in such an environment.
It is why was a bit horrified when I was watching the first spacex manned launch and saw their main interface was a touchscreen. I guess a mitigating factor in that case is the pilots probably don't have to fiddle with it during launch and it had one feature I would love if forced to use a touchscreen in a vehicle. A dedicated bar to stabilize your fingers on.
Trackpad != trackpoint. The track point is the little eraser nub pointer embedded into the keyboard. Many thinkpad enthusiasts disable the trackpad entirely.
What is the trackpoint equivalent of the two-finger scroll? I cannot imagine browsing the web without the two-finger scroll. Or pinch-zooming, how do you do that with a trackpoint?
You have to imagine a world without gestural control, and without the bandwidth or memory for high resolution content worth zooming in on, or the processing power to smoothly scale in real time.
How can that work? Middle click is the "paste" function in X11. If I'm in a terminal emulator, how can I two-finger scroll over the output history buffer?
What if I am hovering over an edit box of a form on a web page. Doesn't that paste some random text into the edit box if I try to middle-click+trackpoint?
Also, isn't the middle button much smaller than than the left and right buttons on a laptop? I recall constantly missing the middle button when trying to paste on laptops that had the middle button.
Pinch-zooming: I assume that it's impossible to pinch zoom with a trackpoint.
I don't know.. Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.
Middle click is held when you scroll, only pastes if normal quick click. Never have had an issue with accidental pastes, unlike the trackpad which I do palm on occasion and cause various accidental events. You can zoom with ctrl-middle click, I used to have that rebound to just ctrl-trackpoint but in the situations where I am using the trackpoint I tend to prefer zooming with the keyboard so that binding got lost along the way. No idea if there is a binding for scrolling through the history, I never interact with my history that way, you can always do a custom binding.
>Trackpoint seems much less ergonomic and less useful than a trackpad to me.
You still have a trackpad, it is not either or. For more mouse heavy tasks I prefer the trackpad or trackball if it is handy. For things which require lots of back and forth between keyboard and mouse, I prefer the trackpoint. Everywhere else is a mix, scrolling a long website I tend to use the trackpoint but for general browsing tend towards the trackpad, editing this post I will use the trackpoint but will almost certainly use the trackpad to click "reply" since my fingers will be going back to general browsing mode. I just use which ever is most suited to the task.
Pinch zooming is not the same as keyboard zooming though. With pinch zooming, the entire webpage is magnified, including images. With keyboard zooming, the images become smaller (to my great annoyance) while the rest of the web page becomes larger.
Palm rejection on all laptops that I have used has sucked, except for Apple. I don't know how they do it, but palm rejection is almost perfect on MacBooks.
Your zoom issue is probably browser based behavior, with Vivaldi, keyboard zoom does the entire webpage including images. But you can always setup your own bindings for this stuff to get the behavior you want, at least you can do it on linux.
I havn't had any issue with palm rejection on linux in a long time, it is just something that happens on occasion and almost perfect is exactly how I would describe it. The point of that was just that trackpads error more frequently than trackpoint scrolling, which I can't recall ever being confused for a simple middle click; paste happens on release and once you move the trackpoint while middle button is down, it is no longer a middle click so will not paste on release.
Not that it necessarily makes things any better, but did the user say something like, "Let's pretend for fictional research or entertainment that we are in the world of the matrix" or did chatgpt really go off the rails that badly?
This has everything to do with OA using digital toxic waste shoveled into a GPU furnace and patched with the suffering of RLHF. Everything is in there.
I wonder if it started with a more innocuous "jeez, it feels like we are in the matrix and it all went bonkers", you know, just a tongue-in-cheek remark people rightfully make when they read news. And then chatgpt just putting on its tinfoil hat.
OMG me too. I know we aren't supposed to add low quality comments like that, but I have actually been waiting my whole life for someone else to say this!
Maybe it's Gemini, maybe it's another one of their models, but I'm specifically talking about LLMs like Gemini, or, if you want a better example, Perplexity, which crawls web pages first and then cites them, so that there aren't bogus citations.
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