MacBook Pro Touchpad Tricks
Ordinarily, I’m no fan of touchpads – trackpads, if you’d rather. On every Dell laptop I’ve bought, I’ve always ensured that they ship with a nipple – or the even lamer sounding pointer stick because I’d rather use that than the touchpad. Interestingly, though, I don’t mind the touchpad on the Mac. Sometimes I even forget that I’m even using it because the transition from a real, live mouse is so smooth.
The reason the transition is so easy, I think, is due to the additional functionality Apple has built into its touchpads. The “trick” is enabling this additional functionality to promote productivity. Admittedly, calling these “tricks” may be a little ambitious since I thought they were pretty introductory, but I’ve had enough people notice what I’m doing and ask, that I figured I’d go ahead and put them in print.
Two Finger Scrolling
I hate to think of what my life would be like if were still having to navigate my cursor all the way over to the scroll bar, place it just so on the buttons and click my way to the position in the document I was looking for. Uh uh. On the Mac, I just drag two fingers across the touchpad – anywhere on the touchpad – and the document scrolls in that direction. It doesn’t sound like much, but I swear that this alone saves me about an hour a day.
To enable two finger scrolling:
- Open System Preferences.
- Select the Keyboard & Mouse icon.
- Select the Trackpad tab.
- Check the option to Use two fingers to scroll.
- Optionally, check the option to Allow horizontal scrolling, if that sounds like fun.
Two Finger Right Click
This feature doesn’t have quite the direct impact on productivity as two finger scrolling, but it’s still pretty convenient. Since Apple’s laptops, like their mice, ship with only one button (seriously, it’s the 21st century; now they’re just doing it to spite us), the only way to right click is to move your left hand off of the home keys and press the Ctrl key when you click the button below the touchpad.
Unless two finger right clicking is enabled. Then just place two fingers (of either hand) on the touchpad and click the button to access the context menu or whatever other right click functionality should be triggered. To enable two finger right clicking:
- Open System Preferences.
- Select the Keyboard & Mouse icon.
- Select the Trackpad tab.
- Check the option that (rather verbosely) states, For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button.
Again, these aren’t advanced tricks and frankly may not be tricks at all, but enough folks seemed impressed and awed by my use of them, that I thought they might be worth writing about.