[stephc_int13]

I never liked trackpad. I am an avid RTS player, the mouse is by far the superious input device.

Besides, I never work on a laptop.

And this is a lame excuse. Smooth scrolling should also work when using keyboard with and pageup/pagedown, at least as an option and with some tuning preferences.

[aruggirello]

Smooth scrolling also worked on the Amiga Cygnus Editor in 1986 - yes, 40 years ago - on a computer with 512Kb RAM and a ~7MHz 68000 CPU, and from keyboard too. And Zed complains at launch if it doesn't find a suitable Vulkan GPU driver, since the fallback CPU driver does not provide a smooth enough experience, despite 4-5 orders of magnitude more RAM, and a ~3 orders of magnitude faster CPU, than a 40 years old Amiga...

[simonask]

Isn’t this just a case of not wanting to or having the resources to maintain a fallback renderer?

Supporting basically-compliant Vulkan GPUs covers probably 99.9% of developer machines. You need a pretty big user base to make it make sense to support the last 0.1% of people without access to a proper GPU driver.

I hope Zed reaches that scale, since I really like the project. But right now I would be a bit disappointed if that was a priority.

[madokaaoyi]

"smooth scrolling" with a mouse or keyboard like you mentioned is a lie. Its animating movement but is not precision input at all. its "smooth" sure but you have zero control over the actual scroll (i do wish zed did this too its genuinely useful as an accessibility aid because it lets your eyes follow where the cursor ends up for example but yeah its not the same as having proper precision input for scrolling as you do with a touchpad). I do agree a mouse is far better at precision input wrt pointing at things but when programming,,,, you do not need to be so precise with cursor movement. you're editing text which is largely keyboard centric, and the time offset between moving your hand from a mouse to a keyboard on a desktop is in my opinion far higher than it is to move your hands from a keyboard to a touchpad surface. Not to mention you get actual precision with scrolling with a touchpad. I personally keep both a proper MMO mouse with a dozen programmable buttons on my desk, and a apple touchpad with precision drivers for normal use.

also wrt scrolling, mice like the logitech mx master actually have what is in my opinion a much better solution where the scrollwheel is not stepped and has scrolling inertia, allowing you to have the same level of precision with scrolling as you do with a touchpad (im not sure if the vertical wheel on it is the same but regardless). Its in my opinion a similar jump in capability for mice as continous triggers were for game controllers. Something that must have been initially quite notable, but slowly became expected behaviour (except on the switch for some reason but whatever i guess)

[LoganDark]

The arrow keys do scroll smoothly in Safari from my testing, but a clickwheel does not. Probably because scrolling inputs are meant to be precise.

[scottlamb]

macOS is a whole thing in terms of smooth scrolling, or HID (human interface devices) in general. It seems like Apple just doesn't put a lot of effort in terms of working with third-party HIDs:

* There's a standard way to enable high-resolution scroll reporting (pixel-level instead of line-level), but Apple doesn't use it.

* There's a standard approach to multi-touch digitizers/trackpads (documented and I think to some extent created by Microsoft, called PTP) which Apple doesn't support.

* Apple's own Magic Trackpad speaks a proprietary protocol and it appears you can only speak it if you claim to use their USB VID/PID. And I don't think doing that would go over well in a commercial product. (And if you do manage to speak it, it turns out their driver really doesn't do two-finger scrolling well with tiny trackpads anyway. They probably only tested it on the generous dimensions of their hardware.) (Also, it attaches to your entire device, so having an additional interface with a different driver doesn't appear to work either.)

But...you can inject smooth scrolling events via Core Graphics. So you can run a userspace program with accessibility permission that scrolls smoothly. And you can also communicate with USB devices from such a program. There are some existing programs for doing smooth scrolling with standard mice (Mac Mouse Fix is one). I'm writing a userspace driver for PTP to make my keyboard's built-in trackpad work properly.

[LoganDark]

Last I checked, high-resolution scroll reporting over USB is not based on pixels but on fractions of a detent, which is annoying to say the least. Apple probably also didn't want to translate multitouch to scroll in hardware, since scrolls are not reported the same in all contexts (e.g. applications can choose whether it locks to an axis; which axes it can lock to depends on the capabilities of the view; etc.)

> But...you can inject smooth scrolling events via Core Graphics.

Applications can choose to ignore synthetic events, IIRC. Probably not an issue for scrolling, but for instance Little Snitch can be configured to ignore synthetic inputs to its security settings.

[scottlamb]

> Last I checked, high-resolution scroll reporting over USB is not based on pixels but on fractions of a detent, which is annoying to say the least.

I'd just be happy if it let me use the multiplier; don't care if it's not exactly pixels.

> Apple probably also didn't want to translate multitouch to scroll in hardware,

That much doesn't seem unique to Apple; both Windows and Linux appear to prefer accepting raw multitouch data.

> since scrolls are not reported the same in all contexts (e.g. applications can choose whether it locks to an axis; which axes it can lock to depends on the capabilities of the view; etc.)

I don't think they're actually taking advantage of this. My MBP's built-in trackpad will lock into pinch/rotate gestures when the cursor's over say Zed or iTerm2. (Zed's a bad example actually, as it has no accessibility tree to speak of. But I think it will lock into pinch/rotate anywhere.)

And for my own app, as far as I know (I'd be very happy to be corrected) there's no way to inspect a view to know what kinds of gestures it supports. It certainly would be nice to eliminate the possibility of locking into pinch/zoom in a place where that's meaningless but I don't see a way to do it.

> Applications can choose to ignore synthetic events, IIRC. Probably not an issue for scrolling, but for instance Little Snitch can be configured to ignore synthetic inputs to its security settings.

Yuck. I'm doing everything this way, including cursor movement and taps. I hope I don't come across such an app/configuration.