I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool. Between dropping out of high school and enrolling in community college, I replaced my laptop with a $80 HP EliteBook I found on eBay; when I discovered its trackpad didn’t work anyway, I went all in on a no-X setup. I eventually concluded that going 90% mouseless got me almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the downsides. It’s almost as if returns are usually diminishing!
Yet there’s one problem I still cannot get over with using an ordinary desktop mouse: The desk space. Not only do you need a large amount of open desktop real estate to work with, the boundaries are fuzzy. You might well find yourself plowing your hand-rickshaw uncomfortable over an envelope, or crashing it right into your brass candleholder, setting your whole timber cabin ablaze. Or maybe you just lose where the mouse is entirely from time to time, buried under a sea of bills.
But a trackball gives you infinite movement for a finite homestead. You plop the ball in one place, and your arms learn to instinctually go to that place every time you do need to take your hands up from the keyboard. You no longer fear hemming your pointing-device in with a wall of bills or tchotchkes. It’s always going to be right there for you, the few times you need it.
And – you get some much-needed insurance against future RSI issues, which, as you might guess from the name, arise as a result of repetitive movements, like using a mouse constantly, or using a … keyboard, constantly. An old-fashioned pool ball style trackball simply opens up a far wider ranger of muscular possibilities for making basic movements with your finger-hand-arm-shoulder effector. Oh, and the big scroll wheels which most trackballs come with these days make reading longform texts in Firefox much more pleasant.
Perhaps the biggest seller for me personally is I simply
have always found trackballs more fun than other input
methods I’ve tried. I get a little hit of joy every time
I use my palm to pan over a few windows in
Sway, even though I could just as
easily do that with a few hits of M-Left. I don’t reach
for my pointer often, and I like it when I do.