I’m going to select ‘System Actions > Lock screen.’ Open the ‘Predefined Action’ dropdown and choose the action that you want this gesture to trigger.I’m going to use ‘Two Finger Gestures > 2 Finger Tap.’ Open the ‘Please Select a Gesture’ dropdown, and choose a gesture from BetterTouchTool’s vast catalogue of supported gestures.Click ‘Add New Gesture,’ which appears towards the bottom of the window.Since we want our gesture to work across the entire macOS system, I’m going to select ‘Global.’
For the purposes of this tutorial I’ll be showing you how to create a gesture that lets you lock your Mac’s screen by tapping on the trackpad, but once you know how to create one gesture, you can use the same process to create a wide range of different gestures. You can use BetterTouchTool to create custom gestures that trigger a wide range of actions across the macOS system and even within specific applications.
Head over to the BetterTouchTool website and download the latest version.
BetterTouchTool does require a license (personal licenses are available from £4.00) but a free 45 day free trial is available, so you can try before you buy. Setup BetterTouchToolīetterTouchTool is a third party app that lets you create custom gestures for your Mac’s trackpad. You can also disable gestures by deselecting their accompanying checkbox, which is particularly useful if you keep triggering an action by accident. If an action doesn’t have an accompanying arrow icon, then this means it’s impossible to select a new gesture for this action. There are also related apps which don’t really overlap in functionality, but target similar needs: Swish, Hookshot, Magnet, Spectacle, Rectangle, yabai, LayAuto, OptimalLayout, BetterTouchTool, BetterSnapTool, Moom, uBar.Note that the available gestures will vary between actions, and there’s a few actions that you cannot map to different gestures.
Only shows apps, not windows (note: can press down to see window of selected app)Ĭycles through tabs and windows, but only of the same app. Also, the almost-good-enough apps are not open-source. However, none was completely satisfactory so I rolled my own. All images are compressed, AltTab is optimized to be as light as possible on the user resources.Ĭhange the shortcut keys, switch to a Windows theme and more, using the Preferences window:īefore building my own app, I looked around at similar apps.