When the touchpad is set to emulate a mouse scroll wheel while using a circular gesture, swiping clockwise is scroll down and swiping counter clockwise is scroll up. Of course, you can change this if you want:
Steam>Settings>Controller>Pair and Manage>Desktop Layout>Edit>Edit Layout>Trackpads>Left Trackpad Behaviour>[gear icon]>Invert Swipe Direction
Or just swap the “Clockwise Command” and the “Counter Clockwise Command” under Steam>Settings>Controller>Pair and Manage>Desktop Layout>Edit>Edit Layout>Trackpads>Left Trackpad Behaviour
But regardless of the fact that it can be changed, there must be some logic to why the Steam Deck touchpad behaves that way by default, right? Help me make sense of why some dev team at Valve decided that the default should be “clockwise=down” despite these other common scenarios in which “clockwise=up”.
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The circular scrolling thing has never worked right for me. I set it to “vertical swipe”.
What I would really like is for the left pad to do panning, like a two-finger trackpad scroll. No notches, just a smooth scroll please.
Scrollbar goes down = items on screen go up. What’s so hard about this?
Because the scrollbar is on the right side. So you’re “pushing” it down with the rotation.
I also hate the default setting.
I changed it to uh, left thumpad moves the mouse, left thumbpad click is middle click, remap the right pad to be 4 way buttons, top and left to left click, bottom and right to right click.
Moved scroll to L2 and R2, or you could map them to up and down on a joycon, or the dpad, or L1 and R1, etc.
I think even a normal scroll wheel goes in different directions between both Windows and Mac.
Yeah, this infuriates me every time I have to use a Mac for something.
This is common on Linux even with scroll wheels and trackpads. “Natural” or “Inverted” scrolling is weirdly the default on KDE, GNOME, etc. I turn that shit off.
I think of it as you’re “dragging” the page in the direction you’re scrolling as if you were putting your finger on it and moving it that way. I don’t like the inversion of that.
You’re comparing apples and oranges. Volume is a value without implying any kind of progress. Time is progress, and turning clockwise gets you further down the progress of time. A scroll bar going up is something visually going up, but it’s not a value, and it’s not a measure of progress going forward. If anything, it’s going back, because you usually start at the top of a list or page that requires a scroll bar. So progress here would be scrolling down.
But I think any interface should make this sort of behaviour easy to configure.
Turn clockwise = page number go up
That’s how I’d make sense of it.
You can also think of it this way. Clock turns clockwise = time goes forward. Steam deck turns clockwise = webpage moves forward. Forward on a webpage is down because of reading direction.
Volume up and time forward both represent forward progress, which corresponds to down while scrolling.
Exactly, this is exactly what I would think it would do
If you twisted a gear connected with a physical scrollbar clockwise, the scrollbar would move down. So think of the touchpad like a gear. Pretty on-theme with Steam lol.
When you turn clockwise, you move down when you’re on the right side.
To scroll down, you move the slider on the right side downwards.
Idk, it’s intuitive for me, but I guess that it’s like inverted controls on videogames. What’s comfortable for you depends on how your brain works.
I think of it as a (the world’s ugliest) cogwheel.
Inverted Y axis players are believed to have a higher intelligence.
It’s the difference of controlling the character (mouse down -> head tilts down) or controlling a camera attached to the character (mouse down -> camera moves down -> camera stays pointing towards the character’s viewpoint -> view angles upwards) to me.
The only problem that I have with that is when Y is inverted, but X is not. It’s simple to wrap my head around “up actually means down”, but to simultaneously have to think “left still means left” is confusing.
In the image if you wanted to turn the character’s head to the left you point your fingers to the left.
You’re not wrapping your head around it correctly
“Up actually means down” is not what people that think with inverted Y-axis. It’s if I pull back the mouse/joystick it’s going to tilt the character’s eyes up.
Image you are flying a plane and you have a single control stick in front of you.
Which way do you move the stick to climb higher in the air?
Which way do you move the stick to turn left?
Makes sense. Let’s say you are standing with a tower directly in front of you. If you want to look at the top of the tower, you would tilt head back and step back to get a less acute angle. If you want to look at the base, you would step forward.
I find it the most intuitive when thinking about flying a plane.
If there is one stick to control the plane
Imagine a toy plane on top of the stick
To make the plane climb in altitude you’d tilt the back of the toy plane down and point the nose up. That would mean pulling back on the stick.
Now if you stick a head on that stick. To make it look up it would be the same. Pull back.
Ironically in your example, if there were icons on the right side of the cogwheel, as the page moves down the icons scroll up.
Imagine a piece of paper. If you pull the paper down, you’ll be scrolling “up”.
True, but at that point you’d have an inverted slider, and that’s outside the scope of my imagination :P
Wrong. That is a sexy cogwheel…
That logic does make sense with the default layout of the left touchpad being used as the scroll wheel, considering that the element that is being scrolled (the screen) is on the right side of the element that is controlling the scrolling (the left touchpad). If someone were to swap the touchpads (so that the left controls the pointer and the right controls scrolling), they would probably also want to invert scroll direction if they want to follow that cogwheel logic.
“More scroll” is downwards.
It’s intuitive to me - clockwise is forward, and if I’m looking at a list or reading a document then down is forward. If I roll a mouse-wheel down in my right hand it’s also moving clockwise relative to me sitting in the middle of my two hands and looking to my right. If I was left handed it’d be counter-clockwise I guess.
I don’t see clockwise as the direction “up” I see it as forward/progress, and forward depends on where I’m going.
I think it’s a matter of perspective.
In your time example, I see it as time going forward, not up. It’s progressing. When you scroll with the steam deck you’re “progressing” through files, which are normally organized in a descending, downward way.
I had a coworker who would say “scroll up” or “scroll down” depending on if he wanted the document/content to move up or down.
I would say scroll down the page if I wanted to see more of the information on the bottom of the page.
The scroll bar needs to move down
I had a coworker who would say “scroll up” or “scroll down” depending on if he wanted the document/content to move up or down.
… is that not typical?
I think he means that the coworker said “scroll up” to mean the virtual page moving up - I.e. when the viewport scrolls down.
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The scroll bar is on the right so this is intuitive to me.
Don’t think of it mimicking a scroll wheel, think of it mimicking a knob. The right side of the knob goes down when turning clockwise. If the scroll bar was on the left it would correspond to the left side of the knob and clockwise would be up (or at least should be).
I know not everyone would find this intuitive. My wife and I both bought the same make of car twice in a row (before wireless car play and android auto so we used the native ui) and the new ones moved the scroll bar on the infotainment from the left to the right, making clockwise change from up to down. I adapted in a day because it was obvious that moving a slightly curved bar on the right is clockwise for down but it frustrated my wife for several months until she got used to it.
Edit: also volume generally goes left to right which tracks with the top of the knob for me so clockwise is up.
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