September 23, 2015

Up is Up

Filed under: Main — Tags: — admin @ 12:01 am

On a touchscreen it makes sense: You drag your finger up the screen and the document scrolls up with your finger. That’s how objects move in the real world. A laptop’s touchpad may not exhibit that similar behavior.

It might just be me, but while I accept that swiping a touchscreen moves a document in the same direction as my finger, on my laptop’s touchpad I want to do just the opposite. I want to swipe down to have a document scroll up.

I have a Lenovo laptop. It features the TrackPoint mouse, which looks like a pencil eraser wedged between the G, H, and B keys, shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Special items on a Lenovo laptop.

Figure 1. Special items on a Lenovo laptop.

Now get this: To scroll the screen in an upward direction, you press the Scroll button and move the TrackPoint down. My brain obviously believes the trackpad to behave the same way.

This problem is most likely rooted in joysticks back in the early days of computer games.

A common question asked when you configured an early computer game was how you wanted the camera tilt function to work. If you pulled down (toward you) on the joystick — or moved the mouse toward you — then the screen would tilt up. This choice mirrors how an airplane’s stick works: Pull back to pull the nose up.

So from my strong education in computer games, I want to pull down on the TrackPoint mouse to scroll the screen up. Likewise, on the touchpad, I want to swipe down to scroll up a document. To me, that makes sense.

The trick is how to set the scrolling or swiping direction on the trackpad.

In Windows 10, you obey these directions:

  1. Start the Settings app.
  2. Choose Devices.
  3. Choose Mouse & Touchpad.
  4. On the right side of the window, click the link Additional Mouse Options. It’s located near the bottom of the list.

At this point, your laptop’s Mouse Properties dialog box opens. Your goal is to find the reverse swiping option. On my Lenovo laptop, I have to click the TouchPad Settings button, then choose Scrolling and then Two Finger Scrolling to locate the option Enable Reverse Scrolling Direction.

Yes, that option is very buried. My guess is that few people really desire to change scrolling direction for the touchpad, so I’m probably the weirdo here. I deserve to suffer.

The nifty thing, however, is that these types of options can always be changed. My point is for you not to give up when you find yourself wanting to do something and the laptop behaves differently. In that case, most likely you’ll find a setting that can switch things to work with you.

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