Friday, March 08, 2013

Dealing With That Awful Touch Pad

I'm liking my new laptop but hating the touch pad. Specifically, I hate the buttons the touch pad.

But then it hit - why do I even need to use those buttons? Why can't I get clever and use a different approach?

My solution: map caps lock to the left mouse button.

This is trivial to do in autohotkey. I just added the following to the standard hotkey configuration I use:

  Capslock::LButton

The harder part is training my brain to actually use it. I initially set this up on my laptop that uses a mouse and a full keyboard. It's odd to control the keyboard click away from the mouse, but also weirdly satisfying. If nothing else, I'm psyched to be putting the caps lock key to a real use, rather than just disabling it.

This may just work.

If this works, I'll have to figure out a key to map the right mouse button to. Baby steps, though, baby steps.

Update: I'm really liking this setup. This approach may just be crazy enough to work. I've added Alt-Capslock as the method for accessing the right mouse click. It's actually pretty easy to type, and doesn't appear to conflict with anything. Here are the latest rules:

!Capslock::RButton
Capslock::LButton

3 comments:

  1. I'm hating that it doesn't scroll, but I'm betting this is fixable, just not by me...yet.

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  2. CJ - you're right, there are probably ways to tweak the touch pad experience so that it's optimal, but I'm with you, I haven't got the foggiest idea yet how to do that.

    I was doing some research yesterday and was surprised to learn that having two separate, physical buttons is actually a mark of lower quality. Apparently the seamless all in one touchpad is what all the cool kids are using these days.

    Who knew?

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  3. Anonymous9:56 PM

    Yeah, but if they don't work...I've had my Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 10 for 6 hours now. I was so incredibly excited to open it, but quickly hated it. I have to touch the touchpad as many as 17 times to get it to take. This is a piece of shit.

    ReplyDelete