Comments on: Lazy Reading for 2013/11/24

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 19 Dec 2013 17:20:46 +0000

In reply to ddb. It's not the trackpoint, it's the keyboard itself. The old Thinkpad keyboard size and shape is the comfiest for me.

By: ddb

ddb — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 12:58:35 +0000

jrm’s suggestions work quite well for me, thanks!

Justin, if it’s mostly the trackpoint you’re after, there’s http://www.pckeyboard.com/ . They sell Model M-style buckling spring keyboards, and some models have trackpoints, too.

By: jrm

jrm — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 18:23:30 +0000

A little more information for mouse control in X…

I also have this in /etc/rc.conf

moused_enable=”YES”
moused_ums0_flags=”-A 2.5,2.0 -a 1.2 -V”

Maybe this applies to DragonFly as well? This little guide might also be helpful: https://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=706&p=3808&hilit=mouse#p3808.

The FreeBSD forums are in transition right now, so things might look strange there for awhile.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 03:23:33 +0000

Ugh. I was apparently just a few months too late finding out about the thinkpad keyboards; they’re discontinued everywhere. There’s a few sellers on eBay, but it’s over $100. I’ll just have to keep watching…

By: vr

vr — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 02:51:29 +0000

I can’t believe no one mentioned the Space Cadet or the later Symbolics Macivory keyboards. What is hacker.net coming to?

By: jrm

jrm — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 02:25:54 +0000

I also have one of the Lenovo keyboards. It looks identical to the one in the picture and I ordered it from Lenovo only a few months ago. The mouse works fine for me in X under FreeBSD. I put “xset m 4 0” in ~/.xinitrc. I use it with my desktop because it feels very similar to my X220 keyboard.

By: Justin Sherrill

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 01:55:06 +0000

My hunch is that the trackpoints on the Thinkpads oversample, and that’s why they seem so sensitive; I have a x230 at work that had the same problem in X and then in Windows 7 until I installed the specific drivers for it from Lenovo.

By: ddb

ddb — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 00:30:41 +0000

I have one of the Lenovo keyboards you mention. Feels more like the newer Lenovo ThinkPad keyboards to me, so it’s quite acceptable, but not as good as the old IBM ThinkPad keyboards. Also, the track point seems to work well only under Windows; under X, it’s much too sensitive. I think I’ve read somewhere that there is no mitigation, but this might be a false memory; I don’t use it (the track point) often anyway.