The first laptop I ever owned was an IBM ThinkPad R31.

It was thick, heavy, black, and unapologetically tool-like. It had none of the thinness or lightness of today’s laptops. Of course, it also had no giant touchpad to stroke with two fingers.

There was a red dot in the middle of the keyboard.

Push it with your finger, and the pointer moved.

For me, that was what a laptop was. Not a machine where you reach for a mouse. Not a machine where you stroke a touchpad. A machine where your hands stay near the home position, and you touch the screen from inside the keyboard.

A long time passed.

Unexpectedly, I found myself with a ThinkPad again.

A used ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 7. I installed Linux Mint and meant to use it as a casual side machine. Write a little. Look things up. Work on the go. That was supposed to be enough.

But it was strangely good.

Thin. Light. Good keyboard. Linux ran smoothly. For a corporate lease-return laptop, it was still very much alive. It was supposed to be a side machine, but before long it had become my main one.

I liked it.

But something felt off.

Convenient, But Not Quite Right

The source of that discomfort was the touchpad.

Of course it was convenient. On a modern laptop, a touchpad belongs there. It scrolls, it handles fine movements, and for ordinary use there is nothing wrong with it.

But it did not quite fit my body.

While writing, I would touch it without noticing. The cursor would move. Text would appear in the wrong place. Small misfires accumulated.

More than that, I think it was also a matter of feeling.

This was a ThinkPad, but the red dot in the middle was not the main character.

Back when I used the R31, I operated it only with the red dot. That clumsy, slightly stiff, but hands-never-leave-the-keyboard feeling remained in me as the memory of what a ThinkPad was.

So I needed to return.

Not make the touchpad easier to use.

Silence it.

Return to the red dot.

You cannot catch the tiger cub without entering the tiger’s den — maybe an overblown proverb for a laptop setting, but that was the phrase that came to mind when I decided to part ways with the touchpad.

The Tiger Appears

I prepared a bash script to turn off the touchpad and ran it.

As expected, the touchpad went silent.

The sensation of applying pressure to the red dot and moving the pointer came back across the long distance of time.

Just when I thought I had caught the tiger cub, another unease bared its teeth like the parent tiger.

When reading long source files, I scroll by combining the middle click button with the TrackPoint. At that moment, text I had selected somewhere would unexpectedly get pasted.

The cause was Linux / X11 middle-click paste.

Apparently it is an old X11 behavior. For users who know it properly, it may be perfectly natural.

But I had only just started living in X11, and to me it felt like noise that had never existed in my original ThinkPad experience.

So the bash script had to be revised.

Choosing an Environment

The old R31 ran Windows XP.

For better or worse, I used the environment that came with the machine. The OS and its input manners were part of the package.

Now things are different.

I bought a used machine and installed Linux Mint myself. The desktop environment, the settings, the scripts — I chose them.

And inside that chosen environment, there was X11.

Returning to the origin required a seal. And it was not enough to simply turn off PrimaryPaste in GTK / Xfce. In the end, I had to keep the TrackPoint’s middle button as the scrolling modifier while preventing it from being delivered to applications as Button2.

The X1 Carbon Gen 7 is a modern thin laptop. But in my hands, it became a small continuation of the R31.

Of course, it is not the same.

The era is different. The OS is different. The machine is different. I am different.

So I cannot quite call this mere nostalgia.

Maybe it is the act of calling an original bodily memory back into a present-day environment.

The Red Dot in the Middle

Even now, I would not recommend this to everyone.

If you like the touchpad, use it. If you like X11 middle-click paste, keep it.

But for me, this fit.

To return my body to the red dot in the middle, disabling the touchpad was not enough. I had to seal away one X11 convention and recover the middle button as a button for scrolling, not pasting.

The tiger cub I caught by entering the tiger’s den was not some new convenience feature.

It was the feeling of placing my hands back on the keyboard.

This piece is a personal account of returning my hands to the red dot in the middle of the keyboard.

I also wrote a companion essay that looks at the same experience through constraints, embodied habits, and interface design.

→ https://emptytheory.rbcn.cc/en/constraints-are-interfaces-trackpoint-design/

Japanese version:

→ https://fragmentofview.rbcn.cc/posts/red-dot-in-the-middle/