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p-e-w 7 hours ago

Reasonable-sounding arguments always come up in these debates, but in reality it all comes down to what you’re used to.

Disabling natural scrolling used to be the first thing I did on a new system. Until I once was too lazy to do it, got used to it, and now I can’t imagine ever going back.

mikepurvis 6 hours ago | parent [-]

So I was a Mac user for years and accepted and adapted to natural scrolling after it appeared as the default in 2011. When I switched back to a Windows laptop for work around 2018, I kept it on natural mode.

But then two years ago I got a desktop computer with an external mouse again and.... natural scrolling doesn't work for me on a physical wheel. With a trackpad, the metaphor is direct, that the page or document is being moved by the motion of your fingers; but with a wheel, I still want to pull it toward me to scroll down, because that feels like rolling the little wheel along the document, or turning it to advance the document beneath, like a printer finishing a page.

Maybe that's all silly, but for me it's natural scrolling on trackpads and conventional scrolling on mice with scrollwheels.

ziml77 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's the sane handling of scrolling. macOS is weird for tying the scrolling direction of trackpads and mouse wheels in a single setting.

mjmas 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Maybe that's all silly

No it isn't.

Both examples match perfectly physically:

- Touchpad is like dragging the piece of paper directly.

- Scroll wheel is like having the paper on the other side of the wheel.