2

I've enabled four finger swiping on my Macbook Pro. Swiping up/down is nice in that it uses Exposé and shows the desktop. But I find the horizontal swipe useless, it only brings the up the application switcher with icons.

Do you know how to rebind these actions? I would prefer to swipe with four fingers to the left and get the dashboard and swipe with four fingers to the right and have Exposé show windows for only the currently active application.

1
  • You can four finger swipe up and then click and drag the different windows around to your liking. :)
    – user263290
    Oct 13, 2013 at 21:59

4 Answers 4

3

Reading Mac OS X Hints I learned about BetterTouchTool, which allows rebinding the four finger swipes. The process is a little bit tricky, but here is how I managed to do it:

  1. Disable four finger swipe left/right.
  2. Disable any associated hot keys to the exposé actions or dashboard invokation from the system preferences menu, keyboard, shortcuts.
  3. Run BetterTouchTool (I'm using 0.306). It will append itself to the menu bar with many other icons on the top right of your screen.
  4. Click on the icon on the menu bar and choose preferences.
  5. Create a new binding for four finger swipe left, and bind it to a shortcut combo you would never ever use. I'm using Ctrl+Alt+F12, and since that key is hardwired to volume up, I have to press Fn+Ctrl+Alt+F12. Pretty elaborate.
  6. Create a new binding for four finger swipe right, bind it to shortcut (Fn+)Ctrl+Alt+F11.
  7. You can close now the preferences window and return to the shortcut window from the system preferences.
  8. Select the Dashboard and dock section, activate Dashboard and write as keyboard shortcut (Fn+)Ctrl+Alt+F12.
  9. Select Explosé and Spaces, activate Windows of the application and write as keyboard shortcut (Fn+)Ctrl+Alt+F11.

If everything has been done correctly, you should have now four finger swipe left bring up or close the dashboard, and four finger swipe right activate explosé only for the active application.

As a special treat, the four finger swipe can also be customized inside specific applications. For instance, in Safari I've made the four finger swipe change active tab to the left/right.

1

I am not sure about what gestures it supports (or even if it works on OS X), but Multiclutch supports binding your own actions to swipes

1
  • Thanks for the info, tried the software but only three finger swipes are available. Hopefully a new version of the software will come out to allow this, either from a third party or Apple. Oct 10, 2009 at 10:52
0

This is a direct quote about the new Macbook

Vertical swipes are more beneficial as they're mapped to Exposé. Pushing upwards shoves all windows out of the way; pulling downwards arranges each one into its own space. We're a little disappointed that you can't re-bind your own choice of actions

0

The answer is no, unless you can disassemble, change and reassemble the code in: /System/Library/Extensions/AppleUSBMultitouch.kext/Contents

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .