The Best Mac Trackpad Settings to Change

The Mac trackpad is the best in the business and it ships configured conservatively. Three settings and two gestures change how it feels, and one of the best options is hidden in Accessibility where nobody looks.

Tracking speed is set too low

Open System Settings → Trackpad → Point & Click and look at where Tracking speed sits. The default is around the middle, which means crossing a large display takes two or three swipes. Move it several notches right, use it for a day, and adjust. Most people settle noticeably faster than the default and never move it back.

If you also use a mouse, its speed is a separate setting under Mouse, and it is worth setting them independently — the right speed for a trackpad is rarely right for a mouse.

Tap to click, and the drag gesture nobody finds

Tap to click is in Trackpad → Point & Click. Once on, a light tap registers as a click and you stop pressing the trackpad down all day.

Three finger drag is the one worth hunting for. It lets you move windows and select text by dragging with three fingers, without holding the trackpad down. Apple moved it out of the Trackpad settings entirely:

1. Open System Settings → Accessibility.
2. Choose Pointer Control.
3. Click Trackpad Options.
4. Set Dragging style to Three Finger Drag.

It takes a day to adapt and then dragging a window by pressing hard feels primitive. The trade-off: three-finger swipe for Mission Control moves to four fingers.

Scroll direction: pick one and stop fighting it

Natural scrolling means content follows your fingers, like a phone screen. It is right for a trackpad and wrong for most mouse wheels, and macOS applies one setting to both. If you use both devices and the mouse feels backwards, that is why. The setting is in Trackpad → Scroll & Zoom → Natural scrolling, and there are separate tools and guides for splitting the behaviour between a trackpad and an external mouse.

The gestures worth learning

Open Trackpad → More Gestures and turn on the ones you will use. These four repay the learning:

• Swipe up with three fingers — Mission Control. Every window on screen at once.
• Swipe left or right with three fingers — move between full-screen apps and Spaces. Faster than any window manager.
• Pinch with thumb and three fingers — Launchpad, or spread the same fingers to show the desktop.
• Swipe down with three fingers — App Exposé, showing every window of the current app. The one people miss, and the fastest way to find the right document window.

Force click, and whether to keep it

Force Touch trackpads register a harder press as a separate gesture: look up a word, preview a link, or scrub through a video at variable speed. It is in Trackpad → Point & Click → Look up & data detectors, set to Force Click with One Finger.

Two camps here, and both are reasonable. If you regularly look up words or preview links, it is genuinely fast. If you find yourself triggering it by accident while dragging, turn it off and use Tap with Three Fingers for lookup instead. Also on that screen: Silent clicking, which removes the click sound without changing the feel, and Click pressure, which is worth setting to Light if you have small hands or a heavy touch.

If the trackpad starts behaving oddly

Erratic tracking is usually dirt or moisture rather than a setting. Wipe the surface with a slightly damp lint-free cloth and dry it. If a specific gesture stops working, check whether an app has claimed it, and check Accessibility → Pointer Control, since options like Mouse Keys change trackpad behaviour in ways that look like a hardware fault.