Click, point, drag, scroll. That’s about the extent of most trackpad users’ experience with their trackpad other than wiping it off when you touch it with sticky fingers. But the Apple Trackpad built-in to Apple laptops and available as an external device (which I use at the office) has much more to offer. And that’s not even talking about the new Force Touch trackpad on the MacBooks and MacBook Pro. I will go over those new features in a follow-up article but I do not have much 1st hand experience with that, yet.
Click
- One
The one that we all know about is taking one finger and clicking on the trackpad surface. It is simple and is your primary tool for selecting content, etc. Click once to place your cursor, click twice to select and highlight a word or to launch an App, click three times to select the whole paragraph.
- Two
But there is more than one finger clicking. Two finger clicks act like the right-click of that other mouse. It brings up your contextual menu which allows you to cut, copy, paste, check your spelling, change fonts, share, etc. If you see this contextual menu popping up you are probably clicking with two fingers instead of one. Once you master the two finger click you might not only find this menu to be handy but you are ready for the more complex three-finger click.
- Three
Okay, now you can try clicking with three fingers and it activates Apple’s Look Up & Data Detectors. What are data detectors? Well, they are a little something extra that is in the Mac OS that you won’t find elsewhere. Mac programs like Mail can recognize commonly used bits of information that may appear in your text: a physical address, a phone number, a date and time, etc. You may have noticed “Look up” in the contextual menu, well, three fingers makes a shortcut to get there. A three finger click on a phone number will look it up in your contacts or allow you to make a new contact, and a three finger click on a word will open the dictionary and much more. Play around with three finger tapping!
Scroll
You use two fingers to scroll and your content follows your fingers. Swipe your two fingers to up and the content moves up, swipe left and it moves left. Flick your fingers at the end of your scroll and you will create some momentum with the scroll.
Zoom
Using two fingers you can “pinch” to zoom in and out. Or double tap with two fingers and you activate smart zoom.
Rotate
Use those same two fingers to rotate an image.
Swipe
If you swipe left or right with two fingers you can scroll between pages in Safari, for example. Or use four fingers and swipe between open full-screen Apps!
Put those two fingers all the way right and swipe left to activate the Notification Center. Swipe up from the bottom with four fingers to activate Mission Control or swipe down with those four fingers and you activate Exposé.
Pinch
This one is a bit complex but very useful. Pinch with your thumb and three fingers and you activate Launchpad. Do you use Launchpad? This is the easy way to get there. Reverse that, i.e. spread instead of pinch, and you show the desktop, also a handy feature.
In Safari, if you have multiple tabs open you can pinch with two fingers to show all open tabs with live content. Spread those two fingers and it is back to tabs.