Trackpad gestures
- The option to use a three-finger drag gesture on Macbook's trackpad allows you could tap on the top bar of any the active window and drag the window around the screen instead of using the standard click and drag.
- Before the advent of the Force Touch trackpad on the 12' Macbook (and the new 13' Retina MacBook Pro), you could enable a gesture entitled Three Finger Drag. With that gesture, using three fingers you could touch the top bar of any window in OS X and drag the window around.
- Three-Finger Gestures and its sub-sections, Top and Bottom, which relate to what happens when you drag three fingers up or down, respectively. I prefer to use these gestures as page back.
Three-Finger Dragging. You can drag pretty much anything on your Mac's screen by clicking and holding down, then dragging. But there is an alternative with a Trackpad that a lot of Mac users like. In System Preferences, Accessibility, Pointer Control, Trackpad Options, you can turn on Enable dragging and then set it to three finger drag.
For more information about these gestures, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Trackpad. You can turn a gesture off, change the type of gesture, and learn which gestures work with your Mac.
Trackpad gestures require a Magic Trackpad or built-in Multi-Touch trackpad. If your trackpad supports Force Touch, you can also Force click and get haptic feedback.
Secondary click (right-click)
Click or tap with two fingers.
Smart zoom
Double-tap with two fingers to zoom in and back out of a webpage or PDF.
Zoom in or out
Pinch with two fingers to zoom in or out.
Rotate
Move two fingers around each other to rotate a photo or other item.
Animal crossing official merch. Swipe between pages
Swipe left or right with two fingers to show the previous or next page.
Open Notification Center
Swipe left from the right edge with two fingers to show Notification Center.
Three finger drag
Use three fingers to drag items on your screen, then click or tap to drop. Turn on this feature in Accessibility preferences.
Look up and data detectors
Tap with three fingers to look up a word or take actions with dates, addresses, phone numbers, and other data.
Show desktop
Spread your thumb and three fingers apart to show your desktop.
Launchpad
Pinch your thumb and three fingers together to display Launchpad.
Mission Control
Swipe up with four fingers2 to open Mission Control.
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App Exposé
Swipe down with four fingers2 to see all windows of the app you're using.
Swipe between full-screen apps
Swipe left or right with four fingers2 to move between desktops and full-screen apps.
Mouse gestures
For more information about these gestures, choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Mouse. There you can turn a gesture off, change the type of gesture, and learn which gestures work with your Mac. Mouse gestures require a Magic Mouse.
Secondary click (right-click)
Click the right side of the mouse.
Smart zoom
Double-tap with one finger to zoom in and back out of a webpage or PDF.
Mission Control
Double-tap with two fingers to open Mission Control.
Swipe between full-screen apps
Swipe left or right with two fingers to move between desktops and full-screen apps.
Swipe between pages
Swipe left or right with one finger to show the previous or next page.
1. You can turn off trackpad scrolling in Accessibility preferences.
2. In some versions of macOS, this gesture uses three fingers instead of four.
Three Finger Drag Mac
3 Finger Drag (3FD) is not available on Windows, and not built-in on Linux
Spillo 1 9 11.
For Linux support, I'll write another post in the future.
On Windows, we can achieve something similar. Let's call this: 3 Finger Tap to Drag Lock.
Three Fingers Drag Gesture Macos Mojevia
It's Dakshin's idea [1], refined further [2] and tweaked below.
What's 3FD anyway?
3 Finger Drag refers to a Mac accessibility feature. When enabled, if you place three fingers on the Mac's trackpad or touchpad, then move those fingers in unison on the trackpad, the mouse pointer behave as if you left-clicked-and-are-dragging.
It's a better more ergonomic alternative to the tap-twice-and-drag method that's common on Macs, Windows, and Linux.
It's better because there's less finger tapping movement which can develop into 'trigger finger' type repetitive strain injury. If you drag things around a lot, tap-twice-and-drag plus another tap to deactivate dragging starts to add up to being a nuisance!
And at least for me, when dragging using the tap-twice-and-drag gesture, I often have trouble continuing to drag mid-drag if I lift my hand away from the trackpad to reposition. And ironically, I also have trouble disengaging the drag once I've reached the target of the drag motion too!
3 Finger Tap to Drag Lock (3FTD) on Windows
The gesture allows you to tap on the trackpad with 3 fingers, which will 'lock' the left click down. Then you can use 1 finger to move the cursor around, thus dragging what's clicked on! A single tap again will disengage it.
You'll need to install AutoHotKey (AHK) as this is a script continuously running in the background to make it happen.
Installing the AHK Script
Make a text file and copy the script below into it, then save the text file with a .ahk file extension. Double click the .ahk script file and AutoHotKey will run it to give you this 3FTD behaviour.
If you want the script to run every time you log in to Windows, you'll need to move the script or add a shortcut to it into the Windows startup folder. See detailed instructions [3] for that.
ThreeFingerTapDragLock.ahk
Limitations of this script: games and VirtualBox
Chances are, this script won't work inside games. Many games access the mouse and keyboard at a lower level than what AHK can effectively manipulate, or has anti-scripting functionality built-in.
AHK also doesn't play nice with VirtualBox since it's virtualizing the keyboard and mouse for the guest OS!
To avoid problems with VirtualBox, I tweaked the above script so it only works outside of it:
ThreeFingerTapDragLock_OutsideVBox.ahk
Note about the Key combo
My trackpad's 3 finger tap sends the key combo Win+Ctrl+Shift+F22.
And it's F24 instead of F22 if I 4 finger tap.
So the Key combo in the scripts above can be easily changed if you prefer a 4 finger instead of 3 finger gestures.
But also, if your laptop or vendor trackpad is different, you'll have to use AHK to find out the appropriate key combo to put in the script instead.
Splayerx 4 1 5 x 8.
References
[1] Enable 3 Finger Gesture for click and drag on Windows and Linux
[2] AutoHotKey - Three finger dragging script causing minor issue, how to fix?
[3] How to Schedule AutoHotKey to Start Up with Windows
