Sorry. Try again.

Nah, full stop was that weird little nipple that turned up in laptops before they invented touchpads. Placed right where it would get hit frequently, damn near impossible to control, and about as accurate as firing chewed up paper out of the casing of a biro…

TrackPoint it is called (an IBM invention I think). Still to be found in current day laptops of certain manufacturers (at least Lenovo and Dell I think, the old HP I am typing this on also has one). A colleague of mine uses it all the time and hates the touchpad. I have no idea how he does it, but he navigates with it at an astonishing speed and precision. Me, the first thing I do is to disable that damn thing.

…what with this big friendly ball in the middle and two large paddles either side.
As you might have guessed, I used it on Windows (3.11). No middle button, oh and I think it plugged into the serial port.

Ah. Slightly different beast – mine (several of them, ex-Physiology publishing office) were RISCOS ones with a middle button, with an Acorn-specific mouse connector. A couple of them got converted to PS2 ( https://clive.semmens.org.uk/DIY/Project5188.html )

It was good in that it just sat there waiting and didn’t require lots of desk space to work, plus you could actually be pretty precise with it.

Exactly. That’s why I hate mice – they run out of desk space, unless you have them configured so fast they’re impossibly imprecise.

But, like with traditional mice, there is a greater range of gestures available these days.

For sure – on the Mac, a trackball (or mouse) would be pretty rubbish. Probably on PC or Linux too, but I don’t use those. On RISCOS?

There is a small RO module that you can use with a mouse – slow movement short distance – quick movement long distance.

I’d far sooner have a (Marconi) trackerball with RISCOS, given that it’s got three buttons and RISCOS doesn’t use gestures anyway. But I’ve not yet modified one to USB. Also since I’m using the same desk and monitor for both Mac and Pi4, I’ve got a switch to use the same keyboard and mouse for both. This isn’t really terribly satisfactory as I’ve yet to find a keyboard that’s good for both – I’m using a Mac keyboard, but it doesn’t have a Break or Escape key – and the mouse isn’t ideal for the Mac.

If I have RISCOS under emulation on the Mac, will RISCOS use the Mac’s trackpad okay?

This isn’t really terribly satisfactory as I’ve yet to find a keyboard that’s good for both – I’m using a Mac keyboard, but it doesn’t have a Break or Escape key

In search of a keyboard with a ‘Break’ key? ‘Escape’ too? That’s one niche we can help fill.

In search of a keyboard with a ‘Break’ key? ‘Escape’ too? That’s one niche we can help fill.

I have such a keyboard, but there are things missing from it that I need for the Mac :( – it’s one I can use satisfactorily for both I really want. Likewise a trackpad I can use for both…

The advantage of the Lenovo, was it had the nipple and a trackpad, also proper mouse buttons between the keyboard and trackpad reachable from either the nipple of the trackpad – and best of all there were three of them, which was great for RISC OS. On the ASUS I have now I, it has no physical mouse buttons and I have to do one, two or three fingered taps.

On Linux with the GNOME desktop, you can configure the trackpad so that the “button” clicked depends on the position on the trackpad. You need gnome-tweak-tool to make the change from the default that David Ruck describes above.