[CarVac]

Speaking of "natural scrolling" it is horrible because most scrolling is downward and "natural" is an ergonomically inferior pushing action instead of pulling.

It's only natural on the actual display itself.

Anothe affront to nature by Apple, along with killing the headphone jack.

[x187463]

On a Macbook, natural scrolling feels right on the touchpad. The real crime is not having a separate setting for a mouse. I had to use applescript tied to a keybind so I can use natural scrolling on the touchpad and toggle to regular scrolling when using a mouse wheel.

[hamdingers]

I love Macbook trackpads, even use a Magic Trackpad at my desk, and "natural" scrolling has never felt right for me.

I suspect my mental model is locked into the "drag scrollbar handle down" mode from the early mouse era rather than "drag page up" mode that is intuitive to people who's first computing device had a touchscreen.

[Tallain]

Another recommendation is LinearMouse. It lets you fix pretty much every problem that MacOS inflicts on mouse users: pointer acceleration, scroll behavior, click/button behavior. This and Karabiner make the OS much more usable for me.

[chuckadams]

I must be the only person in the world who actually likes pointer acceleration. Karabiner is a must though: I use it solely for "remap capslock to hyper/esc", but that's still reason enough.

[mrhottakes]

FYI you can remap capslock in the built-in MacOS keyboard settings. Click Keyboard Shortcuts and then go to Modifier Keys.

[chuckadams]

It's just a hardwired list of targets, and doesn't support the fun combination of bucky bits that I remap capslock to (in lieu of an actual hyper key, which macOS has no concept of). Also, when I tap capslock as opposed to holding it, it sends an ESC, which I'm pretty sure I would need Karabiner for.

[Crestwave]

Check out Scroll Reverser; it's a tiny, open source app that solves exactly this.

There are some other alternatives like BetterTouchTool if you want some other changes like gestures, but as far as this specific problem goes you can just `brew install scroll-reverser`, set up the settings you want and forget about it. Life is too short to deal with this nonsense which is clearly designed to sell the Magic Mouse.

https://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/

[venzaspa]

Hold on, why isn't this a touchpad setting in the OS?

[zapzupnz]

It makes sense on a trackpad too which is what the majority of sold Macs come with. You’re “pushing” the document, not moving the scroll bars. Seems perfectly natural to me. My fingers move up, the document moves up; just like what would happen to a piece of paper being slid up a table.

Yes, it’s less direct than touching the screen, but it makes more sense for the model of UI they’ve been going for over the last 20 years where the content of the window is more meaningful than the window itself, which is to say worrying about where the scroll bars are rather than what part of the document you’re looking at is what’s not natural.

[stronglikedan]

> It makes sense on a trackpad too

No, it doesn't. Trackpads always worked fine until "they" reversed the motion. Now it's always a guessing game for the initial scroll. It's terrible, unintuitive, and doesn't make sense. "Natural" is unnatural.

[zapzupnz]

Touching a trackpad is just an indirect way to touch the document. You're doing the exact same motion, pressing upwards on the trackpad to push the page upwards.

[chuckadams]

What I did when I introduced my very non-technical partner to a mac was leave it at "natural" scrolling, show her the two-finger scroll gesture, let her try it out, then I turned off natural scrolling and asked her which she liked better. She picked the latter hands down. I knew there's a reason I'm with her :)

It's totally a matter of personal taste, both are objectively right depending on what one thinks the thing being manipulated is.

[marmarama]

So why doesn't the mouse pointer work that way on an Apple trackpad?

Surely if that's the case then when you move your finger to the upper left then the pointer should move to the bottom right. Because that's how it would work if it was a real object and you were pushing the pointer around with your finger. Why is scrolling a special case?

Honestly though, I wouldn't mind that much if Apple hadn't decided to call it "natural" scrolling, like you're weird if you prefer up for scroll up and down for scroll down. It's both smug and reeks of the same kinda of discriminatory attitude that made life hard for left handers.

[addaon]

The pointer represents your (pointer) finger. Single-finger motions affect the pointer. Scrolling motions affect a representation of the document. When I move my (real) finger up, my (real) finger moves up. When I put my (real) finger on a (real) document and move it up, the paper of the document moves up, causing new text from the bottom to appear in my field of view.

[card_zero]

Or scrolling represents a viewpoint, such as a frame, or a finger pointing at the document. Then it's the other way round again. You can't just declare what the metaphor is, it's arbitrary.

[CarVac]

It's the ergonomics that I have an issue with.

[tjoff]

On any non-apple system it has the "natural" scroll on the touchpad AND sane scrolling behavior.

[zapzupnz]

It doesn't have that on Windows. When natural scrolling is enabled on Windows, it works the same as on macOS.

[mhandley]

It's not just the ergonomics - in my head I'm moving the cursor (and with it my view) down through the document, not moving the document up. Which is mentally different from a touchscreen, though I expect people who grew up with touchscreens never built that mental association that we're moving the cursor. Fortunately Apple allows be to change it. <end old-man-mode>

[mhandley]

Thinking about it some more, it really is about consistency regarding the cursor. On my trackpad, not in "natural scrolling" mode, I get this:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor down through the text (moving the text up)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text (and selects).

in Natural Scrolling you get:

  - One finger down moves the cursor down through the text.
  - Two fingers down moves the cursor up through the text (moving the text down)
  - Thumb-click plus one finger down moves the cursor down through the text and selects.

If you start scrolling with two fingers and release one, the cursor reverses direction! This inconsistency just really feels wrong to me, but I guess you can get used to anything.

[Izkata]

For me it's completely different with the same result: I imagine the scroll wheel is on the paper (screen), so my finger going down rolls the wheel and the bottom of the wheel pushes the paper (screen) under it upwards.

For whatever reason this persists to touchpads even though they would seem closer to a touchscreen.

[CarVac]

I always viewed the classic scroll method as a mirror to what happens on screen.

[p-e-w]

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]

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]

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]

> 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.

[jonhohle]

Apple, to my knowledge, never sold a mouse with a wheel. Their first mouse with scrolling was the Mighty Mouse, which used a small trackball to simulate a touch surface. It was spring mounted and would fall flush when scrolling oven a sensation similar to the Magic Mouse (this is my favortite mouse and the one I still use today). The Magic Mouse extended on this idea by replacing the ball with a multitouch trackpad.

In either scenario, “natural scroll” feels like you’re pulling on the surface which maps directly to sliding on the screen.

It makes less sense if you think about a wheel pulling the page beneath it.

[mtVessel]

All mice supported scrolling. In the before times, you use the mouse to drag the scroll thumb, which was located on the scrollbar. And you'd drag it down to see information further "down" in the document.

[jonhohle]

Of course they support scrolling with on screen controls. So has the keyboard. I said they’ve never made a mouse with “scroll wheel” which is a very specific device for physical input.

[spijdar]

Apple is hardly the first to have used "natural" scrolling.

While I have no idea who was, I do know that John Ousterhout's text editor and terminal emulators Mx and Tx used "natural scrolling", made pre-1989. Their scroll mechanism is shift + left/right click then drag, using "natural scrolling", e.g. push mouse up to scroll down. Left click scrolls normally, right click scrolls quickly.

[herpdyderp]

I go out of my way to enable "natural scrolling" on every device I use (it is possible on Windows!) because I've never been able to stand the opposite.

[kgwxd]

I think "natural" feels right on a touch pad but, I have a standard/wired KBM setup for working and a wireless keyboard with "touch pad" for sitting on the couch. That "touch pad" registers itself as a "mouse". OSes let you pick different scroll directions for mouse and touch pad, not specific devices. I have to switch manually when it bugs me enough. Just can't win. There is no perfect keyboard. Someone please prove me wrong.

[Innittech]

Apple's just doing what's on the agenda, plugging the analog hole. Your TV doesn't have a headphone jack any more either. TVs haven't had this in decades.

[archargelod]

My TV does have an audio jack. It's a cheap dumb TV. And almost all of my electronic devices have a 3.5 mm jack. You won't find it in top flagship models, but plenty of budget devices still have it.

[delecti]

I don't know what the line is for "flagship" is, but my $2k 4k smart TV (which isn't connected to the internet) also has a 1/8" jack.

[CarVac]

My LG OLED TV does have a headphone jack, and I send that through a mixer (combined with my CRT gaming setup's output, my record player, and my PC's output) to my stereo.

[voidUpdate]

I don't think I've ever owned any headphones with a long enough cable to plug into my tv when I'm sitting at a comfortable viewing position

[fwip]

Thankfully, you can buy a cable extender for like $2, because it's a standard that has been around for 150 years.

Example: https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=648

[Scoundreller]

Just be aware of your surroundings if you do this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=APJhnjaHql0

[autoexec]

3.5mm to bluetooth adapters are also an option for wireless headphones if you don't mind the quality loss and other bluetooth annoyances.