Mac trackpad gestures keyboard shortcuts how to#
Mac trackpad gestures keyboard shortcuts mac#

Mac trackpad gestures keyboard shortcuts how to#

RELATED: How to Add Custom Buttons to the MacBook Pro Touch BarīetterTouchTool would be worth it for the touchpad options alone, but that’s not all it can do. You can repeat this process to create custom gestures for just about anything. Just like that, we’ve added a middle click to our trackpad, making it easy to open links in a new tab among other things. We’ll select that and we’ve got out complete action mapped. We’re looking for middle click, so let’s look at Mouse Click Actions. I’ve lost none of the multi-button powers of my mouse, and the added gesture-specific features of the Magic Trackpad let me do even more with it than I could with my mouse.The scope of these actions are staggering: almost anything macOS can do is offered here. My wrist is much happier now that it doesn’t have to flick a mouse across my three connected displays. The tricked-out trackpadįor my needs, I’ve found that this combination of the Magic TrackPad, BetterTouchTool, and some utilities is the perfect mouse replacement. This composite image shows the five tasks assigned to the virtual buttons on my Magic Trackpad. Help Finally, I use the top-right corner to bring up an application’s Help menu-this is done by simply mapping the nearly-universal Help shortcut (Shift-Command-/) to that tap location. This, too, is done via a Butler shortcut that’s mapped into BetterTouchTool. I used Many Tricks’ utility Butler ( ) to define this action and give it a keyboard shortcut, which I then mapped in BetterTouchTool.Ī Google search window A bottom-right tap displays a Google Web search window, so I can submit Google searches without first switching to my browser.

Often-used folders A bottom-left tap brings up a hierarchical menu containing my often-used folders, so I can quickly drill down and open any of my most-used files. This (along with my existing utilities) would allow me to replicate the functionality of my multi-button mouse while gaining the gesture features of the Magic Trackpad. For me, the key feature was the ability to assign actions to newly-available gestures. It even lets you assign various actions to keyboard shortcuts. In addition to its not-yet-final support for the Magic Trackpad, BetterTouchTool works with many third-party trackpads and Apple’s Magic Mouse. The BetterTouchTool utility allows you to define your own gestures and actions. (Haven’t seen gestures before? Check out this video demonstrating them on a MacBook trackpad.)īut then I stumbled across Andreas Hegenberg’s BetterTouchTool (donation requested).

Giving all that up, to simply gain gesture support on a slick-looking input device just wasn’t worth it in my book.

With those buttons, and some help from various utilities, my mouse handled a variety of tasks, including drilling down into Finder folders, searching the Web, displaying a program’s menus at the mouse location, and switching between all my open windows.

Mac trackpad gestures keyboard shortcuts mac#

While gesture support seemed useful on my desktop Mac Pro, I wasn’t willing to give up on my mouse (a Razer DeathAdder) and its five customized buttons. When Apple first released the Magic Trackpad($69 ), my initial response was something of a yawn.