I love everything about the FW16, however, I absolutely despise trackpads without dedicated buttons. It’s the only thing that makes me hesitate, and sadly these are going out of style. I’m fully open to making my own module, but I was hoping someone had some pointers on where to start, like documentation, or if someone has a project already, I can just modify it. I’ve seen the Thinkpad mod, which looks great, but I have a Clevo right now which has the buttons on the bottom which I much prefer.
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Welcome to the forum
Just want to check, this is the one you saw?
That’s the furthest along project I’ve come across for touchpad at least.
If you like buttons on the bottom, I’ve never tried it, but I imagine you might be able to have the touchpad driver swap input directions so that you can mount the touch pad buttons down. If you’re using a Clevo, I suspect you’re on linux.
That is the project I saw, but I couldn’t find any actual code written for it yet, and it would be very hard for me to do that since that’s not my specialty. I’m actually on windows, it’s an Origin laptop, but those are just Clevo’s.
Gotta say I completely agree with you here. The best track pads I have ever used are ones with 3 physical buttons so I still have the very valuable middle click that is so useful on Linux. The one on Framework 16 is so annoying and bad to use that I also carry my mouse and a mouse pad with it anywhere I go and will be using the mouse if I have my laptop anywhere other than in my lap.
Framework is a bit of a mixed bag in that they innovated on the repairability area where it had never been done before, and yet they reduced features in areas that had been great in laptops for decades by removing the hot-swapable battery and track pad buttons.
I still bought one as it IS replaceable and changeable and the cool things it brought outweighed these massive usability drawbacks to me. Here’s hoping for a trackpad upgrade in the future that brings buttons.
Just want to make sure you know, that the pad itself is also a physical button and you can press the pad in the lower left and right corner to get a left and right click respectively? I know, this is not the same as dedicated buttons, but as close as it gets without those.
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I figured as much since that is the standard, the main issue for me with those types of trackpads is dragging, and clicking both buttons at the same time. The first issue is manageable, but the second one I’ve always found impossible.
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With the FWL16 keyboard being QMK there is another option, that while far from ideal, might be good enough until someone does a proper trackpad with buttons.
QMK can do mouse clicks. And with some use of QMK tapdance, combos, and / or macros you could do whatever you want, click-drag, clicking left & right mouse together.
If clicking both buttons is one thing that really needs to be solved, you could say, program tapdances with the Right-Alt, and Right-Ctrl keys. Quickly tap and immediately hold Right-Alt for Left Mouse button. And the same for Right-Ctrl for Right Mouse button. Do them together, Right & Left Mouse button together.
Now Via (the point-and-click configuration interface for the keyboards located at keyboard.frame.work) doesn’t offer the ability to configure QMK tapdance or combos. But a community member created a Vial/QMK port. Keyboard: VIA / VIAL support? - #50 by Allen_S. Vial is an alternate point-and-click configuration interface that does offer tapdance & combos, as well as other features Via lacks. https://get.vial.today. Currently, Vial/QMK firmware is available for ANSI keyboards and the macropad.
If you CAD with a trackpad, eeh.
Now, some apps the trackpad is great. Blender, for instance. But others like freecad is (*winces*)
yeah.
Buy macropad and set up left and right click on the macropad. Or numpad, that works as well.
Honestly probably not that terrible. Disable the touchpad button (you can prob just jam the thing with folded up paper so it can’t be pressed), Should be a decent vibe.
You can also straight-up program the numpad to act like a mouse, QMK support that.
I don’t enjoy the idea of a firmware being hamstrung to support multiple things. It’s cool, but QMK workbench and stuff exist. We should just optimize for that, and we should all work to make it work better.
Digging through the FW16 repo for the numpad and stuff is kind of a colossal pain, but eventually I found what I need. I think.
I blame the keyboard nerds.
Agree 100%. My old laptops with physical buttons below the touchpad, including both Thinkpads and MacBooks, were great. I had my own muscle memory gestures where I would control the pointer with my index or middle finger and perform clicks with my thumb. It’s very unfortunate that it went out of style. These new touchpads where the entire touchpad is a button are a step backwards. The whole touchpad button also offers more resistance when clicking than the old separate buttons, which is tiring to your hand.
Framework 16’s touchpad is not bad, it’s pretty good quality, and I do use it more often than with other laptop’s, but it’s still sub-optimal for this reason. I would welcome an alternative module with a traditional touchpad.
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Thank you all for the responses (and the confirmation it’s not just me lol). I think I am going to buy a FW16 and either A. get an external trackpad and embed it into the FW16, I’m perfectly happy sacrificing a USB port, B. try and figure out a way to move the trackpad from my current laptop over, I think it’s PS/2 so it should in theory be relatively easy (at least it shows up in device manager as PS/2), or C. just deal with the FW16 trackpad. I used to do a ton of gaming and CAD on my laptop, but since I built a highly capable desktop about 3 years ago, I haven’t used my laptop for CAD unless on the move, and I don’t do hyper intense games on my laptop anymore, hence why I’m technically downgrading (my current laptop has an RTX 3080 Ti), so buttons aren’t as much of a necessity as they used to be, it’s mainly just muscle memory and the natural human aversion to change.
Regarding the touch pad. I don’t tend to click it at all. I use a “tap” to click feature that works well to me. This is where you tap the touchpad softly and it outputs the equivalent of a click, without needing to press the touchpad to make actually ‘click’.
I use an external wireless mouse and wireless SpaceMouse for CAD navigation.
I mainly use my PC for CAD work but when I do use my FW16 it’s great with the external mice.
yeah you wish that’s a thing.
I also wish for a possible Wacom pen interface, similar to what’s on the Thinkpad W700/701DS. Though I don’t know if there is enough depth for it.