[jcgl]

I originally bought the touchpad for my UHK. But, much to my surprise, I have gravitated towards the keyboard's built-in mouse layer over time! Now I scarcely plug in the touchpad (or even key cluster) modules at all.

As a sidenote, I love my UHK. Just a joy to use, and it's so easy to customize. I don't have any experience with competitors like the ZSA Voyager, but the UHK's configuration software and macro language do make it quite pleasant to bend to your will. For instance, I do some funky stuff with macros and lighting here: https://www.cgl.sh/blog/posts/wnl.html

[1dom]

I had a UHK for a few months before refunding it because the shielding wasn't good enough to stop it becoming unreliable when my mobile phone was within about 30cm of my keyboard. I contacted support and the solution was to move the phone away from the keyboard, which is kind of irritating for such an expensive piece of kit.

But, just wanted to share that I was similarly surprised to land on mouse keys as a preference. I tried most of the UHK modules which were also pretty good and have since tried various other trackballs and pads, but since trying UHK mouse keys, they're what I keep coming back to most, even since switching to new keyboards.

One issue I have with mouse keys is fear of using them in front of others though: every so often, if I need to click something particularly small and don't have a keyboard shortcut memorised (vscode panel resizing is one) it can sometimes take me a fair few embarrassing seconds drawing small squares around my target before I resort to actual mouse hardware.

For the amount of time and thought and effort people have put into alternative mice, I feel mouse keys are massively overlooked and probably have a lot of room for software/firmware innovation without hardware costs.

[tra3]

You bring up a good point -- I have the same issue with mouse keys. I wonder how the track point gets around this. Is the tracepoint "progressive" in that it allows various speeds depends on deflection from center?

[1dom]

That's a good question and make me think. I always thought the trackpoint nubs were binary too, basically just a stick in the middle of up/down/left/right mousekey buttons, bit it turns out they're not!

For original trackpoints, it's basically a stick in the middle of an up/down/left/right resistive strain gauge.

For the ploopy beans here, they use hall effect sensors instead of resistive strain to get a bit more movement.

As soon as you have non-binary up/down/left/right values, the mouse direction and speed can be interpolated to so many values that mousekey accidental squares become impossible.