Despite being a heavy cell phone user for more than 25 years, it only recently occurred to me that vertical navigation on most phones is inverted when compared to traditional computers. You swipe down to navigate upward, and up to navigate downward. I recently spent time using a MacBook, which apparently defaults to this “natural” scrolling (mobile-style), and I was completely thrown off by it.
I’ve been using natural scrolling on a couple of my own desktops ever since, mostly as a mental exercise, and I wondered…how many of you folks prefer this method?
Traditional for mouse, natural for touchpads.
Yep, my Sway config has
input type:touchpad natural_scroll enabledThis is the way
It’s a good thing Apple doesn’t make cars. They’d put the gas pedal on the left just to be different, and claim it’s more “natural” that way.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
Don’t give Tesla any ideas.
Yeah, they would probably let you pay a small fee per month for this feature.
You meant traditional or the wrong way. There’s nothing natural about it.
Trackpads and touchscreens get the phone way of scrolling.
These feel like you are interacting with a piece of paper, so you move the paper around.Mousewheels get the traditional way of scrolling.
Mice are more like controlling something.
It just is. Like F1-F12 keys are always F1-F12 keys, not the alt-function (like media/brightness etc).I hate that Apple has called it “natural” Vs “reverse” in some psychological reconfiguring that you are going against the grain if you don’t agree with them (as opposed to them changing the established standard).
Good points all around, though I do use my alt-functions more than the function itself.
I use natural on the trackpad and traditional using a mouse.
If it’s a touch screen then the “natural way” is more intuitive, as it feels like grabbing the actual subject matter and moving it in a direction while my view point stays the same. Once my hand is not touching the subject matter, the traditional way is the only one that makes sense to me. I also get annoyed when something has scroll wheel zoom and up is zooming out, I have to reverse that back or I just don’t use it.
There is nothing natural about “natural scrolling”.
It feels like gaslighting.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
I guess it depends on what the base line is. When reading a large news paper for example, I presume most people hold it steady in their hand and move their head to progress. Which would be the “traditional scrolling”. If you assume a large scroll of paper (ancient egyptian style) I guess moving the scroll and keeping the head (mostly) steady works fine or even better. That would be the “natural scrolling”.
But yes, in modern times I can’t think of an equivalent of the scrolls to explain why we would consider that “natural”, if we don’t do it outside of the computer.
deleted by creator
I view it as controlling the scroll bar rather than the content. Down moves the bar down. Up moves the bar up.
deleted by creator
Traditional for everything, mouse or touchpad, natural scrolling fcks with my brain
Traditional for both scroll wheels and trackpads (trackpads are emulating a mouse, you heathers!) And inverted Y for gaming.
I consider trackpads to emulate the touch of the screen (so like a phone). So natural scrolling for me.
I used to use inverted Y, but it stopped feeling right at some point in the Xbox 360 era and I switched.
I think it was the first console gen where FPS really took off. Like there were FPS on PC for a long time before that, and Halo was pretty big on the Xbox, but the PS2 ones were all kind of clunky and experimental.
I think I only used inverted Y to start with because the only first person games I used to have were flight sims.
Nah a touchpad feels more like a smartphone display than a mouse, so “natural” scrolling it is. Inverted Y for gaming too. I think it depends on what you grew up with - playstation and Xbox don’t use it per default but Nintendo (at least old consoles and games) does I think, so I cannot switch back to not inverted, it feels unnatural.
Natural is totally unnatural.
Traditional for mouse (and trackpoint).
Natural for touchpad.
Down is down and up is up
Unless it’s a stick/yoke.
Pull is up, push is down.
Right?!! Consider this - if you replace the scroll wheel with two buttons, which one would you press to scroll down?
“Natural” only seems natural if you were raised mostly on touchscreen devices, I’ve never seen a desktop have inverted scroll like that.
On a side note, Why do so many Linux programs not support auto scrolling by default if at all?
I didn’t even know autoscroll was the name of middle clicking to scroll were your mouse went until I switched to Linux and noticed it missing in certain places.
I think it is because of Unix/X11 tradition of the middle mouse button being for pasting the most recently selected text.
I think the only place I’ve ever seen autoscrolling available was Libre Office, and I turned it off there because nothing else has it.
Firefox does too, but iirc it has to be enabled in about:config.
And fortunately for me, Firefox is the main place I want to use autoscrolling. It’s nice for reading long articles, or browsing lemmy threads… (I’m trying to think of other places I might want autoscroll. I don’t recall ever wanting to use autoscroll on a file browser or a settings window or anything like that. It would be good on a pdf reader though.)
i can’t even grasp how one can reads while the page autoscrolls down. When I had tried it I could only think about whether the scrolling speed is the absolutely optimal and if I make it on time or if it scrolls faster or slower than I read. Of course I couldn’t understand what I was reading since my mind was not paying attention at what I was reading, since it was occupied with the logistics.
For me it’s only useful with Firefox and the monitor running at 144Hz/fps. I used it for long webcomics, where constant scrolling is good enough to read the few lines. But otherwise I’m also not using it much.
Not in about:config, there is a setting in the normal preferences for that.
Traditional for everything. Scrolling down means the view goes down. The mouse controls the camera (the reason why I always invert Y axis on controllers).
Traditional - unless it is fingers on the screen!
Real gangstas also switch their PGUP and PGDN keys to natural scrolling.
Easy there Satan
