Give a hint as to which thread?
Mice, touchpads, touchscreens, and trackpads all belong in the trash? How do you control your computer then? Keyboard only like DOS?
Direct neural link, like a true Chad.
Hey, toggle switches were exactly how you booted a classic PDP-8! While you watched through the window as dinosaurs prowled the landscape. It was only much later that actual disk drives and disk operating systems appeared.
Obviously, with an erasorhead pointer. It maybe a track ball (shudder).
I was avoiding the hijack, even though I have opinions, but I just can’t resist this one.
[Reposting the picture because I can’t include it in a quote]
How am I supposed to put that touchpad right up against the bottom of the keyboard, where it belongs, with that cable coming out of it? Even my wireless ones take the charging cable in that same location, so I can’t actually use the touch pad and charge it at the same time.
All of these touchpads were designed by dedicated mouse users, and they either weren’t THINKING, or deliberately design them to make trackpads pieces of shit.
It would go to the side of the keyboard. That’s how most people use something like that. But consider that it looks like it’s less than 25% of the size of a mousepad, so you’re still going to save a lot of desk space.
You want to use a wireless touchpad while it is plugged in and charging?
Think about what you just wrote.
Hmm. 
/kidding
Sounds like you are loosely describing the Mystery Dungeon spinoff series.
But … [said the dog, sending the thread on another huge hijack!] with an optical mouse you don’t usually need a mousepad at all, and the range of motion required is usually very small.
And maybe it’s just me, but I have the mouse near the farthest corner of the desk near the base of the monitor, not anywhere remotely close to the keyboard, because I find it most comfortable to use by stretching my foreleg over the desktop and placing my front paw over the mouse that way. 
I simply cannot imagine how anyone could find a trackpad superior to a good optical mouse. Trackpads are fine as convenient built-in pointing devices on laptops, but they are no substitute for a mouse for long-term use, IMHO. Of course, others may disagree with me, but as always in such cases, they’re wrong! 
That does negate one of the best features of track pads, but it’s similar to the first one i used, which resolved my ergonomic issues. Also, touchpads have more precision for many operations than mice. (It depends what you are trying to do.)
The one in the photo I posted allowed muti-touch, so you can pinch and zoom, rotate, etc.
It’s closer but not quite what I have imagined. I’ve shared this idea before and Mystery Dungeon always comes up, I think I even tried it once, but it’s not exactly what I’m dreaming of.
This definitely at least is on topic for that mouse battery thread, which may be what got us onto this whole thing. Yes, I do want to plug in my wireless trackpad while using it, because I forgot to charge it. As just a hmm kind of quirk, my Logitech trackpad is still wireless while plugged into the computer, but the Apple one becomes wired when charging off the computer.
If I’m going to use something to the side, I may as well just use a mouse.
The reason I use a trackpad below the keyboard, like the way it’s setup on a laptop, is because my problem is tennis elbow. Moving my arm from the keyboard to the side mouse day after day causes problems. A mouse below the keyboard is just stupid. A trackpad below is perfectly ergofriendly for me.
ETA: because I hadn’t read to the bottom of the thread when I hit reply:
A mouse above the keyboard! I don’t know if that is brilliant or stupid. Either way, I can’t move it with my thumbs while my fingers are on the homekeys.
What if I have a laptop…on my lap. It’s almost never on a desk. I have a wireless optical mouse that I almost never use
Yeah, I wasn’t thinking of them as two different things. But I suspect I’d have the same problems with a touchpad as I do with a touchscreen. On the rare occasions when I’ve tried to use one it didn’t go all that well.
Which would undoubtedly cause me to often do one of those things when I was trying to do something else.
Now he’s on “Epstein might have said "‘I talked to Bill the other day’ and that means everyone named William is going to be blacklisted”.
I’m starting to think he’s in the files.
I doubt it, he’s just like that, weirdly defending all sorts of indefensible people. Doesn’t he have his own pit thread?
I think they all do that? I certainly expect it. I don’t usually turn on any of the three-finger functions (which aren’t usually activated by default) but in the unusual circumstance where the pinch-to-zoom isn’t on by default, i turn it on.
They mostly only rotate stuff in places where a mouse would rotate in the same way.