For my office set up, I have an external monitor connected to my laptop and then use a Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. This past week my original external trackpad finally called it quits. I rummaged through my desk and found my magic mouse. After a day I quickly remember why I loved my trackpad and preferred to keep the magic mouse in my drawer.
I have never been a huge magic mouse fan, for years I used the Kensington expert mouse before switching to the trackpad. I simply find the trackpad more intuitive and versatile, I’m forever swiping in error on the mouse or double tapping when I should single tap. Don would say it’s user error, I disagree! None the less, here are some tips and perhaps new tricks for those thinking about or currently using a trackpad.
Four Fingers on the TrackPad
The four-fingers-down gestures are dramatic and an easy way to appreciate the power of trackpad gestures, so we’ll start with them. Say you have a lot of windows open, and you want to move them all aside quickly so you can open a file on the Desktop. Place your thumb and three fingers together on your trackpad and then spread them outward. Your windows scurry to the edges of the screen. To bring the windows back, reverse the gesture, pinching your fingers in toward your palm. If you haven’t moved windows aside, pinching your thumb and three-fingers together instead opens Launchpad, which shows icons for installed apps. Click an icon to open that app, or use the spreading four-fingered gesture to exit Launchpad.
Three Fingers on the Trackpad
Move three fingers horizontally on your trackpad and either nothing will happen, or you’ll switch to a different “desktop space.” This state of affairs is most easily seen by making an app full-screen, including the menu bar ( to put it back, hover the pointer at the very top of the screen and click the green button again )
You can swipe left and right horizontally to switch in and out of the Safari space. As you make more apps full-screen, they’ll each create their own space. Have you tried to swipe vertically with three fingers? You can swipe up to enter the All Windows view of Mission Control, which shows all open windows as thumbnails, plus desktop spaces in the top bar. Click any thumbnail to switch to it, or jump to any space by clicking it. You can also click the plus button at the upper right or drag any window into the top bar to create a new space. To move a space’s apps back to the current space, hover over a space on the top bar and click the close button that appears. To exit All Windows view, swipe down with three fingers.
Two Fingers on the Trackpad
In Safari, swipe left on a page to go back in that tab’s page history or right to go forward. Also in Safari, tap two fingers on the trackpad to zoom in on the content. Another two-fingered tap zooms back out.
Want to open your Notification Center quickly? Swipe left from off the right-hand edge of your trackpad. Swipe back to the right to close the Notification Center.