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I'm running a MBP with OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and recently got an external (Magic) Trackpad. I don't like the angle of the trackpad and want to flip it around so that the battery bar is on the side facing me.

I found this article mentioning it might be possible to invert the Magic Trackpad orientation with these commands:

defaults write com.apple.trackpad.orientation TrackpadOrientationMode 1

or

sudo defaults write com.apple.MultitouchSupport ForceAutoOrientation YES

I've tried using them and rebooting, but it does not seem to have any effect.

Is it possible to invert the trackpad orientation for Mac OS X?

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  • Can confirm ForceAutoOrientation works in Yosemite 10.10.3. A reboot of the trackpad, not OS X, does the trick. Also confirmed here: blog.pythonaro.com/2015/01/… – Ray Shan May 26 '15 at 19:05
  • Do you have anything working for OSX 10.15 (Catalina)? – Lucio Mollinedo Nov 28 '20 at 16:21
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These should work on OS X 10.6, the key here is resetting the orientation:

With this hidden pref, the trackpad auto-detects hand orientation from 5 resting fingers and rotates the coordinate system to match.

So after setting these and rebooting, rest five fingers on the bottom of the track pad so that it will auto-orientate.

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I know, it's a two-year bump, but I saw this question after responding to the identical but newer https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/121499/reverse-magic-trackpad-turn-180%C2%B0… thought I'd keep this one current too.

sudo defaults write com.apple.MultitouchSupport ForceAutoOrientation YES

still works on Mavericks 10.9.5 (requires an admin pw and a reboot). I haven't personally tried defaults write com.apple.trackpad.orientation TrackpadOrientationMode 1 but that may still work too.

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This appears not to work anymore on MacOS 10.12 (Sierra). Corroboration from Apple discussion forum, here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/30704137#message30704137

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Just open terminal and type:

sudo sudo defaults write com.apple.MultitouchSupport ForceAutoOrientation YES

sudo defaults write com.apple.trackpad.orientation TrackpadOrientationMode 1

No need to reboot, just disable and enable bluetooth it will work...

Just applied it on 10.10.2 and now 10.11.3

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