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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

The author didn't list real mouse buttons as a benefit, and I see from the image it has them. I've been buying refurbished Dell business class laptops for a decade, the last one I bought, a Dell Latitude 7420, doesn't have them, which is turning out to be a big problem. It means that cut-n-paste went way up in hassle and inaccuracy. Why did laptop vendors quit putting in mouse buttons? Does the average Windows user only left click on things? Does any laptop come with mouse buttons these days?

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IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.

Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.

Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.

Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.

But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.

Alas, as a Linux user, X11 doesn't seem to do that sort of thing: a 2-finger tap is nothing at all according to xev. 2-finger and 3-finger trackpad clicks are basically unreliable left and right mouse button clicks.

I haven't been able to put in .Xresources entries to make some other keypad event into mouse clicks either.

Depends on your laptop and exact trackpad model. I have a T470 and the trackpad works fine. That said, it does have three physical buttons (for working with the trackpoint), which I use with the trackpad when I want to do complex drag and drop operations.

ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

My X1 Carbon Gen13 has physical mouse buttons - I totally love them.

They're enshittified now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92bdOcsBVpQ

The ThinkPad is still the only recent-ish laptop you can actually buy with a trackpoint and a full-size ethernet port.

The trackpoint of old is my favorite input method for laptops. But the trackpoint of new is not like the trackpoint of old. I still prefer it to the trackpad personally, just because it's so ingrained in me, but I no longer try to convince friends and family. It's on its way out, culturally, because of said enshittification.

The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.

The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.

Maybe it's just me but I find the buttons below the spacebar far more convenient to use together with the touchpad.

Yes, they are. The first generations of HP ZBooks had both the ThinkPad stick and the touchpad, so they had two rows of buttons, one below the space bar to be used with the stick and one below the touchpad to be used with the touchpad. ThinkPads usually have both the stick and the touchpad but only the buttons for the stick.

I thought i was crazy looking for mouse buttons in laptops, seems like the cool thing to do is leave them out.

Everyone trying to make a laptop that looks like Apple but doesn't work like one.

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