I understand the intention was to get more touchpad area by not having physical buttons. And the fullsize touchpad works great on a Macbook. But Macbooks don’t have hinged touchpads, allowing you to click anywhere, and use multi-finger clicks to simulate right and middle clicks.
The Framework design of having left, middle, and right clicks be three different zones at the bottom of the touchpad is infuriating, because there is zero physical indication of where these thresholds are. Frequently I will left or right click when I want to middle click. Or worse, I middle click when I want to left click.
If you’re going to continue with the hinged design with zoned “buttons”, my suggest would be to CNC some grooves into the zone, so you can find them by feel.
Preferrably though, in a future model I’d like to see a touchpad more like the Macbook’s, which can be clicked anywhere, and use multi-touch for different clicks.
Edit: I was wrong. The click area was being setup by libinput, and is not a limitation of the touchpad in the Framework.
I was able to fix this by setting the click method to “clickfinger”.
There’s a hardware middle click? I honestly didn’t know. I’ll usually just tap-to-click with 2/3 fingers for anything other than a left click, more reliable than having to move my hand to a different part of the touchpad.
Thank you for pointing out that this is software configurable. I’m on Linux, and my touchpad driver is handled through libinput. It turns out the default is to have click areas on the touchpad (including a small middle click area). But I was able to configure it to use multi-touch clicks like on a Mac.
I’d still prefer to see a non-hinged touchpad on a future revision, but this solves most of my problem.
I’m running Linux Mint on my Framework, and I ran into this issue as well, constantly middle-clicking when I wanted to left-click. Thanks to the information given above, I was able to figure out how to use Option “ButtonMapping” “1 1 3” in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf to convert my middle button into an extension of the left button.
However, there are times when I would like to have the ability to middle-click, but I want the middle button to start further to the right on the trackpad. Is there any way to remap the size and location of the middle button rather than just completely disabling it or remapping it to function as a left button as above?
