Ask Lemmy: Traditional vs natural mouse scrolling; which do you use?

Trackpads and touchscreens get the phone way of scrolling.
These feel like you are interacting with a piece of paper, so you move the paper around.

Mousewheels get the traditional way of scrolling.
Mice are more like controlling something.
It just is. Like F1-F12 keys are always F1-F12 keys, not the alt-function (like media/brightness etc).

I hate that Apple has called it "natural" Vs "reverse" in some psychological reconfiguring that you are going against the grain if you don't agree with them (as opposed to them changing the established standard).

It's a good thing Apple doesn't make cars. They'd put the gas pedal on the left just to be different, and claim it's more "natural" that way.

I never remember which one is natural and which one is reverse. When I use a mouse or a trackpad, I am moving the scroll bar. When I am using a touch screen, I am moving the content.

The thing you're apparently calling "traditional" seems natural to me.

I've never really stopped and thought about it before, but as far as I can figure, my brain expects the part of the system that does or would actually touch the surface to drag the screen in a particular direction through the simple workings of physics.

On a touchscreen, it's simple - it's my finger actually touching the screen and it drags the screen around exactly as I'd expect.

With a mouse, my finger isn't the important part because it's not touching the surface (or more precisely, the mousepad that substitutes for the surface). Rather, my finger is contolling the mouse, and the underside of the mouse is touching the surface. And as far as that goes, the "traditional" way it works is correct - when I move my finger downward on the mouse wheel, the bottom side of the wheel - the part that would actually be touching the surface if it was a purely mechanical system - is moving upward, so would drag the screen upward.

So to me, that's what's natural.

"Natural" only seems natural if you were raised mostly on touchscreen devices, I've never seen a desktop have inverted scroll like that.

On a side note, Why do so many Linux programs not support auto scrolling by default if at all?

I didn't even know autoscroll was the name of middle clicking to scroll were your mouse went until I switched to Linux and noticed it missing in certain places.

There is nothing natural about "natural scrolling".

Natural is totally unnatural.

In the beginning, the mouse did not have a wheel. The only way to move the view was by dragging the scrollbar with the mouse pointer. So when we got mouse wheels, it was easy to just connect the wheel to the scrollbar. And thus the traditional direction makes sense since you are moving the scrollbar, not the view. With time, the scrollbars became more and more hidden, and we got a disconnect between what we were scrolling (the almost hidden scrollbar) and what we thought we were scrolling (the view). When you think of it as manipulating the view directly, the natural scroll makes sense. Because that is what we do in touch devices (manipulate the view directly).

That said, I use traditional scrolling because it's what I am used to.

Traditional with mice, natural with touchpads.

Interesting story, I used traditional scrolling with touchpads all my life until I spent three years exclusively using a desktop. Came out of it suddenly rewired to scroll like I do on my phone.

Traditional for mouse, natural for touchpads.

Real gangstas also switch their PGUP and PGDN keys to natural scrolling.

I use traditional scrolling for everything except touch screens.

Traditional - unless it is fingers on the screen!

Down is down and up is up

Traditional for both scroll wheels and trackpads (trackpads are emulating a mouse, you heathers!) And inverted Y for gaming.

You meant traditional or the wrong way. There's nothing natural about it.

I hate how natural is called natural cuz there's nothing natural about it, when using a touchpad or mouse you're controlling the viewport, mouse down should move the viewport down

Start realising that the way you're used to scrolling with your mouse wheel, is a cog between you and the service it's moving. Actually you were using natural all along. It was the early touch pads that were wrong and nonsense.

If it's a touch screen then the "natural way" is more intuitive, as it feels like grabbing the actual subject matter and moving it in a direction while my view point stays the same. Once my hand is not touching the subject matter, the traditional way is the only one that makes sense to me. I also get annoyed when something has scroll wheel zoom and up is zooming out, I have to reverse that back or I just don't use it.

Traditional. I'm too old to learn new things

Traditional for scroll wheels, natural for track pads.

Traditional for everything, mouse or touchpad, natural scrolling fcks with my brain

I hate "natural" scrolling but I understand that it's only because I've been conditioned for decades with the traditional desktop scrolling method. It's not "better", it's just not worth the effort to retrain myself for something that is merely equivalent.

UI design should not be dictated by what people learned on decades-old systems. It should be designed just as much for new users. So even though I personally hate it, I think it's a reasonable default.

I remember when I first started using GUIs, the scrolling direction seemed counterintuitive. As I introduced beginners to computing in the 90s, I saw many with the same confusion at first. "Why does it move up when I press down?" Everyone got used to it pretty quickly, but that doesn't make it "right".

Traditional for mouse and natural in case of touchpads. That what I use with my Mac :)

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Traditional. I imagine the mouse wheel on top of the screen, as if the wheel scrolls the screen content

Natural on mice, traditional on trackpads.

Traditional all the way. "Natural" is not right.

Traditional for mouse (and trackpoint).

Natural for touchpad.

Traditional for everything. Scrolling down means the view goes down. The mouse controls the camera (the reason why I always invert Y axis on controllers).

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We still scroll "down" to the "bottom" of the page, so how is moving your finger up more natural? Maybe i'm just old now.

The scroll wheel is attached to the roller of the scroll, that's how I feel about it.

"Natural" is so ingrained in me by now that Samsung Dex' lack of the option is fucking with me.

I think the reason Apple also went with natural scrolling for mice is because of their Magic Mouse which attempts to act like it's a trackpad. The gestures are similar to how they are on their trackpads, so it's consistent.

Touchscreens and trackpads? Natural scrolling all the way, we're directly moving the content. It works the same as if your two fingers were click and dragging the content, it does feel pretty natural.

With a traditional mouse, I see the wheel as already inverting the movement: imagine the content is the mousepad, traditional mouse wheel direction scrolling down would be pushing the content under the mouse upward. Although I think the real reasoning is probably just either you're controlling the scroll bar or the engineers just thought that's what felt natural and intuitive to them at the time. It was probably born as basically just a more granular page up/down button that became a wheel.

Traditional with an actual mouse, natural on my track pad. On the track pad, traditional feels super weird.

It makes no sense to me. A lot of Windows drivers seem to default to it now, so scrolling down on the wheel scrolls up on the screen. I always change it back to the old method, as this way is backwards to be.

Curiously, I used to work teaching tech-illiterate elderly people how to use computers/phones and they always expected the behavior to be like natural scrolling. Perhaps, it's indeed the natural way...

I use traditional on my trackpad. I did get forced into natural scrolling on another device for a while and it wasn't difficult to switch. But I'm not going out of my way to switch. A trackpad doesn't have the same mental model as a touchscreen.

If I'm not literally touching the content I'm trying to scroll, I'll stick to the default orientation (scrolling down moves content down). Wayland touchscreen input handling seems to handle this just fine and not couple touchscreen scroll direction to trackpad/mousewheel scroll direction.

Traditional for everything that isn't a touchscreen. Partly bc it's what I was raised with, partly practical. It's easier for me to two-finger scroll traditionally on a trackpad since it's less finger/wrist movement. If I use natural my fingernails hit the trackpad making the input unreliable, or I end up having to p much move my whole forearm to scroll. So traditional works better for me personally.

I get the idea behind natural scrolling, but there's that level of disconnect for me since I'm not interacting with screen directly, so my brain thinks of it like a mouse instead of like touchscreen. I'm guessing my brain might think of it differently had I been a little younger; I've used computers to some extent all my life, but didn't own a touchscreen device until college.

Idk, natural scrolling on any pointing device trips me up.

The normal kind! ;)

I like traditional scrolling, that's how I learnt and how I like it on all my computers.

Unfortunately, I also have a MacBook, which I love! The touchpad scrolls the "Natural" way, like on any modern phone, but if you plug in a mouse, it scrolls the "Natural" way, too. Which I hate! You can change the scrolling direction in the settings, but that will change the scrolling direction for the touchpad as well, so I'm stuck.

It's so frustrating that I gave up using a mouse on the MacBook.

I much prefer natural scrolling for trackpads since I can do the same as on my phone: Flick it into the direction I want the content to go and then catch it once it's where I want it to be. Even though I use different fingers, I feel like the muscle memory transfers.

I'm pretty sure windows defaults to that ever since they introduced a proper trackpad API, which was 2016 iirc.

For scroll wheels I use traditional. It's what I've been using all my life and I found no reason to switch.

Natural, which is somehow not default. Despite being called natural. Not weighing in ok what is right. Just interesting how the language came to be.

I use both a pc and Mac, as well as my phone and I just get mixed up all the time. Gives me something to think about.

if you've flown a plane you probably tend toward natural.

Generally it's more about the interaction. If the user views it as interacting with the viewport, it tends to be inverted. If the user views the interaction as interacting with the scroll bar, it's "natural". Scroll wheel is the only odd one out. However it was introduced prior to mousepads supporting gestures. So it basically started as an extension of the scroll bar interaction, but as mousepads introduced the concept of interacting with the viewport, scroll wheels were given the option to respond either way based on user preference.

as someone who frequently must switch between mac/linux/win/etc, i have had no choice but to switch to 'natural' because the varied OSes point you that way now. i used to spend much time learning how to customize each and every setting, but it became more hassle than it was worth to just learn the new way.

I'm glad someone else feels opinionated about this! It seemed to me that everyone I come across these days only knows "Natural"!

No I don't on pc. It feels more natural to do reverse scrolling for me on a mouse. On my laptop when I use a window manager it defaults to reverse scrolling, but when I switch to a desktop environment it defaults to natural scrolling, so I just go with whatever the laptop gives me on the touchpad.

I use a rotary knob for scrolling since I don't own a mouse

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At work I sometimes switch the scrolling over to traditional. Others get completely thrown out and cannot grok it! 😂

I noticed this in video games rather than on-screen text scrolling. Some of them had a weapon selection, but instead had mouse-wheel-down "decrease" the weapon slot, and mouse-wheel-up "increase" it. However, the game also used the mouse wheel for other things, thus changing it to my preference had some unexpected side effect.

In any case, mouse-wheel to scroll view works because of the mouse-pointer paradigm. Move both mouse-wheel and mouse in the same direction, and the pointer is further along the content. Move them in opposite directions, and the pointer tends to hold position relative to content.

Natural, but I use a touchpad.

Natural always.

I grew up with traditional/viewport scrolling but IMHO it was better suited for single-layer, static layouts. Natural/content scrolling has the advantage in modal, dynamic layouts with nested scrolling context, which are now the norm.

Explanation: once we introduce multiple layers of content overflow, scroll events control (at least) one active context inside the viewport. Boundaries of scrolling contexts can be ambiguous, especially when scrollbars are hidden. If the user must “move the viewport over the content” but can’t easily predict which viewport will move, the interface will feel less intuitive to them. Natural/content scrolling bypasses all that: forget the viewport, forget active context, just focus on the content and move it around to see what you want.

This is how I learned to stop worrying and love natural scroll.

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