[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.