Trackpad gestures: Mac OS X on the MacBook / MacBook Pro

Something I learned while digging around the System Preferences on my MacBook: Mac OS X features what they call “Trackpad gestures.”

Depending on which Trackpad gestures you enable, you can:

• Scroll by dragging two fingers down or across the trackpad.
• Enable the secondary click menu (the equivalent of Ctrl+click, or the Mac’s version of a right click) with two fingers on a trackpad plus a trackpad button click.
• Click by tapping the track pad (rather than the track pad button)

To enable, go to Keyboard & Mouse under System Preferences. Trackpad gestures are at the bottom of the dialog box.

It takes a little while to retrain your brain to use the gestures. But I like that I don’t have to reach for the Ctrl key when I want to bring up a secondary menu. To me, anything that decreases the amount of finger dancing I do with my keyboard is a good thing.

I do find, though, that the click-pad tap can be a little too senstive. Either that or I need to adopt a feather-light stroke.

I also like the two-finger scroll. Much easier to manage, in my opinion, than the two-handed scroll option (one hand holding the trackpad button while the other hand scrolls), or the one-handed scroll motion of death (using your thumb to hold down the trackpad button while using another finger on the same hand to scroll). Now I have no reason to go anywhere near the scroll bar.