Physically the whole clickpad formed a button, logically the driver interprets a click as a left or right button click depending on the placement of fingers.

Touchpads are called clickpads if it does not have physical buttons, but instead relies on 'software buttons'.

Touchpad drivers can also allow the use of multiple fingers to emulate the other mouse buttons (commonly two-finger tapping for the center button). To drag, instead of performing the 'click-and-a-half' technique, the user presses down while on the object, drags without releasing pressure, and lets go when done.

To select, one presses down on the touchpad instead of a physical button. Tactile touchpads allow for clicking and dragging by incorporating button functionality into the surface of the touchpad itself. Some touchpads and associated device driver software may interpret tapping the pad as a mouse click, and a tap followed by a continuous pointing motion (a 'click-and-a-half') can indicate dragging. Hardware buttons equivalent to a standard mouse's left and right buttons are positioned adjacent to the touchpad. For common use as a pointer device, the dragging motion of a finger is translated into a finer, relative motion of the cursor on the output to the display on the operating system, analogous to the handling of a mouse that is lifted and put back on a surface. While touchpads, like touchscreens, are able to sense absolute position, resolution is limited by their size. Fingers insulated by a glove may also be problematic, and capacitive touchpads was rarely used for medical hardware input. Capacitance-based touchpads will not sense the tip of a pencil or other similar ungrounded or non-conducting implements. The most common technology used in the 2010s senses the change of capacitance where a finger touches the pad. Touchpads operate in one of several ways, including capacitive sensing or resistive touchscreen.

Toshiba mouse pad locked