Trackpad Gestures Not Working on Mac? 7 Fixes

When swipes and pinches die, it's almost never the trackpad hardware — pointer still moves, clicks still click, but Mission Control won't fan out and pages won't swipe. The culprit is usually a settings conflict or a stale system process. Work through these seven fixes in order; most people are done by number three.

Fix 1: Confirm the gestures are actually enabled

Obvious, but macOS updates and migrations occasionally reset these, and every gesture has its own switch:

1. Open System Settings → Trackpad.
2. Check Scroll & Zoom for scrolling, pinch, and smart zoom.
3. Check More Gestures for swipe between pages, Mission Control, App Exposé, Launchpad, and Show Desktop — several of these ship disabled, so a "missing" gesture may never have been on.

Fix 2: Resolve the three-finger drag conflict

This is the big one. If three-finger drag is enabled in System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options… (as the Dragging style), then three-finger swipes belong to dragging — and any gesture set to three fingers silently stops working. Either set the dragging style back to Without Drag Lock, or go to Trackpad → More Gestures and switch Mission Control, App Exposé, and swipe-between-full-screen-apps to their four-finger variants. Undo is just reversing whichever choice you made.

Fix 3: Relaunch the Dock process

Mission Control, App Exposé, and Show Desktop are run by the Dock. When those specific gestures die while scrolling still works, the Dock process is wedged:

# restart the Dock (it relaunches itself in about a second)
killall Dock

Your windows are untouched; the Dock and Mission Control simply restart. There's nothing to undo — the relaunch is the fix.

Fix 4: Restart the Mac

Unfashionable and effective. A restart reloads the multitouch driver stack, which no smaller intervention reliably does. If gestures die every few days and a restart always cures it, note which apps you'd been running — gesture utilities and screen-sharing tools are frequent offenders, and pinning the pattern down now saves you fixes five through seven forever.

Fix 5: Check for a gesture-stealing app

BetterTouchTool, Swish, Multitouch, and similar utilities intercept gestures to remap them; a misconfiguration or crash leaves gestures claimed but unhandled. Quit the utility entirely and retest — don't just disable its rules, since a hung event tap keeps swallowing gestures until the process exits. If quitting fixes it, relaunch the utility and re-grant its permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility; a permission half-revoked by a macOS update is the classic cause. Remote-control and screen-recording tools can have the same effect while active.

Fix 6: External trackpad checks

For a Magic Trackpad: charge it, toggle Bluetooth off and on, and if needed un-pair and re-pair the device in System Settings → Bluetooth. Gestures degrade before pointing does when the battery is nearly flat or the link is marginal.

Fix 7: Hardware-level resets, in the right order

On Apple silicon Macs there's no SMC or PRAM ritual — a shutdown (not just restart), thirty seconds of rest, and a fresh boot is the whole procedure. On Intel Macs, reset the SMC and NVRAM using Apple's key-combination steps for your model if gestures are dead even in a new user account. And that new-account test is worth doing before any reset: create a user in System Settings → Users & Groups, log in, and try the gestures. If they work there, your account's preference files are the problem, not the machine — and the fixes above, reapplied in your account, will land.