#trackballs

What these are:

Orbit Fusion

The same one I used to have, the conservative option. Occasional wireless issues and a kind of crunchy scroll ring, but otherwise few issues. Fun sculpted design, Most convoluted button layout. Shiny crimson orb.

M575

I have never used a thumb trackball for more than a few minutes before, I have opinions that welcome being tested. Arguably the weirdest one despite looking the most like a conventional mouse. Very modern, Logitech's general purpose wireless technology. Also comes in a very pretty white option, best price because Logitech made way too many so I can get a good deal. Stormy blue orb.

Wireless Optical

The primary appeal of a trackball (for me) is space usage: a mouse occupies everywhere on a desk it could possibly move to and putting other stuff down shrinks its useful area. Trackballs are fixed in place and so you can pile as many microcontrollers or embroidery projects in front of you as you want without impinging on your mouse.

I also like that it's always in the same place. I usually keep it stuck right up in front of the numpad, so when I need to use the mouse it's right next to the keyboard and I don't have to worry about where on the desk it could be.

Trackballs used to be pretty popular with everyone because they were nicer than old ball mice. Nowadays as far as I can tell the main users are “people who got used to trackballs in the 90′s” and “audio/video engineers”, because AV techs usually have mixing decks or keyboards taking up a lot of their desks and it’s nice to have a small but versatile pointing device.

As far as what makes a good trackball, well, I've only used two for an extended period of time, but everyone has opinions. Personally I dislike the Thumb Trackballs like the ones Logitech sells

because the thumb isn't a particularly dextrous digit. I use "finger Trackballs" where the ball is available on the top, and so you can manipulate it with your whole hand. This means you can go down to fine finger movements, or go all the way up to swiping across the ball with your palm.

I find that using thumb trackballs is very strenuous after short periods of time, it requires a lot of precision and has no good lazy fallback, whereas the finger trackballs can be palmed about and are generally easier to work with. Your mileage may vary, but I like this.

This one in particular has some nice features. It has a scroll ring for scrolling, which is fancy (although only Kensington trackballs have it for patent reasons, boo, hiss, etc.), and a reasonable set of buttons: left, right, and middle click, plus forward and backward. I don’t use nav buttons, but I bound forward to function as a modifier. If I press the forward button and move the trackball, it scrolls around freely in 2D. This is the objectively best way to scroll in my opinion and weirdly as far as I can tell it’s only natively implemented in Linux’s xinput mouse driver. There’s no option for it in the Windows trackball software.

I also like having a few buttons I can press without having to fully grip the mouse. When I’m just playing a Visual Novel or reading an ebook or some other interface where I click to progress something, it’s nice to just whack a side of the mouse. My old trackball was pretty good for this, and of course the creme de la creme of trackballs, like the Elecom Huge or Kensington Expert, have plenty of upwards-facing buttons.

So of course, I listen by the USB hub, but what? It’s coming from over by the keyboard? I know that thing’s quiet so...

the TRACKBALL?

A half hour diagnosis later and a) this seems to be a known problem with the budget Kensington USB Orbit trackball, and b) the problem is that the power-saving mode for the LED is a pulsed signal and that sets up some kind of resonance in the sensor that then emits a high pitched whine. The pitch and volume of the whine is dependent on the reflectivity of the trackball, it’s almost gone if you take it right out but if it’s sitting on a shiny side it’s /loud/. Looks to be a 2.5kHz PWM signal. The sound goes away when you use the trackball because the LED switches to a constant signal, so no resonance, but that logic is all confined to the mouse so I can’t instruct it to disable power-saving over USB.

I tried jumping full power to the LED but some sense line on the microcontroller uses that to determine some kind of state so while you’d think everything should function, I can’t solve it like that, and I can’t crack open the sensor module to see what’s causing the whine without breaking everything. So I guess I am upgrading to one of these wireless ones now. It was high time to move on up the product stack anyways, I guess.

The trackball is much less accurate than a normal mouse but it can sit right up next to my keyboard, usually just under the arrow-keys, and it’s ~always~ there rather than just getting left wherever it was last like a mouse is.

The lower accuracy means I pretty much only use it for selecting windows and doing coarse text editing in rich text windows, I still use vim and vim commands for text editing, and I have added Qutebrowser to my already keyboardy Firefox+Vimium browser repertoire.

I also like having the big paddle-style click buttons rather than the smaller ones of a mouse, I find that I now break up the “move” and “click“ parts of what would usually be one movement: moving the trackball over and then just whacking the general side of the trackball with the side of my hand.

If you don’t use your mouse a lot anyway and you think that it takes up too much space on your desk, I think a trackball might be exactly what you need.