Sep 7 2022
Any permanent solution to accidental touchpad clicks?
Any permanent solution to accidental touchpad clicks?
I have always liked the idea of the functional design, which to me means a purpose-built design. It is not just for the sake of a design or a look. Such a design fulfills a purpose and in the case of the laptop’s keyboard, the function is to help us type. However, most often, the touchpad comes in the way.
While typing on a laptop, I have frequently faced this problem of accidentally clicking the touchpad. And, every time this has happened, I have wondered — Why have laptop makers stuck to the keyboard design with touchpad beneath the spacebar?
Why don’t they change it for a better design — switch the touchpad and keypad areas, or place it at the top or some other place so that it doesn’t hinder typing?
The problem is more acute and frustrating when you have to type or edit something very quickly or when the document is quite long. You start to edit a document and by the time you think you have made the necessary changes, you find that the sentence or the paragraph that you wanted to edit didn’t get edited and instead, due to your palm’s accidental brush with the touchpad, the cursor has travelled to some other location. As a result, you have added some edits in some other paragraph or sentence.
So now, you have to read the sentence (or may be even the whole paragraph) which were accidentally edited, rectify it to the original state and then come back to the paragraph or sentence that you actually intended to edit and begin all over again. This time, you have to be doubly careful and keep looking over the screen to see that the edits are occurring where you want.
After some research, I came to know that you can reduce the sensitivity of the touchpad. For this, you need to:
Click the Windows button, On Windows 11.Type TOUCHPAD SETTINGS and click on it.On the right side, you will see TAPS, with a finger pointer icon.Click on TAPS.You will see the option TOUCHPAD SENSITIVITY.On its extreme right side, you will see a drop down menu that will show options from MOST SENSITIVE to LOW SENSITIVE.
However, despite performing the above action, I persist to face the problem of the cursor jumping to some other part of the page. In fact, I faced this issue while typing this how-to. This time, the cursor had reached the top of the page.
For now, I think the only permanent solution might be to redesign the keyboard in such a way that the touchpad doesn’t come into play while using the keyboard.
This episode is also available as a blog post: https://keyedinto.wordpress.com/2022/09/07/any-permanent-solution-to-accidental-touchpad-clicks/