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Magic Mouse & Trackpad Gestures

BetterTouchTool currently supports the following touch devices:

  • Magic Mouse 1, 2 & 3
  • Magic Trackpad 1, 2 & 3
  • All multi-touch capable built-in MacBook Trackpads

You can configure many additional gestures for these devices.

The setup is straightforward:

  1. Select the Magic Mouse or Trackpad section
  2. Click the "Add" button.
  3. Select the gesture you want
  4. Assign at least one action or keyboard shortcut to that gesture. (If you assign multiple actions, they run in sequence.)

alt text

Fluid / Continuous Gestures​

To change a value while your fingers move, select a gesture from Fluid / Continuous Gestures in the Trackpad selector. Three-, four- and five-finger swipes, two-finger pinch and rotation, and one-/two-finger edge slides can drive action fields such as volume, brightness or MIDI values. Existing gestures continue to work alongside them.

See Fluid / Continuous Gestures for setup, action categories and examples, and Action Value Bindings for connecting movement to numeric fields.

Gesture Configuration​

Every gesture has a few basic settings:

  • Trigger only if specific modifier keys are pressed
  • Show a HUD overlay once the gesture is triggered / recognized
  • Repeat the action while at least one finger is still touching after the gesture has been triggered. This doesn't work with all gestures. For example, after a Three Finger Tap there are no fingers left touching the trackpad.

It does work with all click, tip tap and swipe gestures, for example.

trackpad basic config

There are also some advanced options:

  • Trigger conditions
    • You can choose to trigger only if the mouse cursor is at a specific position:
      1. Anywhere
      2. While mouse hovers draggable part of window's titlebar
      3. While mouse hovers anything in window's titlebar
      4. While mouse over Dock
      5. While mouse over menubar
      6. While mouse is NOT over Dock or menubar
      7. While mouse behind Notch
      8. While mouse NOT behind Notch
  • Advanced Trigger Conditions
    • With the "Advanced Conditions..." button you can define lots of conditions that control when a gesture is allowed to trigger. See Advanced Trigger Conditions for more details.

For example, you can make the gesture trigger only on specific trackpad types ("Required Trackpad Type"), add haptic feedback ("Additional Haptic Feedback") or show a HUD (similar to the macOS volume or brightness indicators) when the gesture is triggered.

Triggering a second action after removing the last touching finger​

Many gestures can trigger another action once you lift the last finger from the trackpad or Magic Mouse.

This is very useful if you want to set up a middle click for CAD apps, for example. You could use a three-finger click to trigger "Middle Mouse Down", and then "Middle Mouse Up" once the last finger has left the trackpad / Magic Mouse surface. That way you can three-finger click, lift two fingers and pan by moving the remaining finger. Use the predefined action "More Mouse Buttons & Modifiers(⌃⌥⇧⌘) / Custom Click" to send separate down/up clicks.

To do this, select the "Actions Executed On Touch Release" action trigger category via "Action For Trigger Category" (it only shows up for supported gestures):

On Touch Release