Windows 8.1 Touchpad Gestures

[Tarja Rabito]

With Windows 11, you define the meaning of every touchpad tap, swipe, and pinch. Do you want a three-finger tap to open the Settings menu? You got it! Would you like to tap a single finger to single-click? Done! Learn how to curate touchpad gestures, cursor speed, and more to use your Windows 11 laptop your way.

In the Touchpad menu, choose the action for three-finger and four-finger swipes and taps from a short list of options, including switching between apps, desktops, or sound settings. In Touchpad > Advanced gestures, you can take more control of three-finger and four-finger movements; select from a wider range of options for each of these movements: tap, swipe up, swipe down, swipe left, and swipe right.

When you navigate to Touchpad > More touchpad options, the Mouse properties window opens. There, choose from several pointer types and schemes, button configurations, and more.

I have already configured three-finger up and down to be volume up and down, respectively, from windows touchpad settings, specifically the Advanced Gesture configuration. I have also configured the three-finger tap to be mute, by recording Fn+F8 on my keyboard, and it works, even though it shows up as a D.

I am trying to do the same, to configure swiping left and right to be brigtness up and down, respectively. However, whenever I hit record and press Fn+RIGHT ARROW, it simply increases the brightness, without recording it.

hey i finally figured out using the app "gesturesign" on microsof store, this is a much simpler app compared to alternatives. it's also free. I'm personally using four finger brightness up/down. Make sure to use 'continuous gesture', also there are settings that can be customized.

This is a problem because the area where I can actually move the mouse with my finger is too small (or, I mostly use the top left of the touchpad). So I often end up doing a swipe and bringing up some menu, or to do the swipe so slow that no menu is appearing but the mouse pointer is also not moving when I move my finger. Quite annoying.

When swiping from left edge it earlier swapped apps like crazy. I disabled that, so now it only brings up the same menu as pressing win+tab (or some times the charms bar, I never know which). I could change that by:

However, after experimenting with drivers I found a Synaptics driver from ASUS that comes with something they call ASUS Smart Gesture. There, under the Edge Gesture tab one can disable the different swipe gestures. Easier and safer than messing with the registry.

For my Dell, I went to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Devices and Printers. Right click on the laptop picture and select Mouse Settings. Click on Dell Touchpad, and in that screen select the link that says "Click to change DellTouchpad settings". Go to Gestures.

I have an HP that also has a Synaptics TouchPad and I just searched (in the main Windows 8 search thing) "touchpad" and it brought up a few different results under "Settings", one of which was the Synaptics TouchPad that I have, so I clicked on it and it opened a window with settings for my touchpad. One of the settings says "Enable Edge Swipes" and I just unchecked it and now it's good.

On my Acer Aspire with windows 8, I right clicked the bottom left corner to reach the control panel. From there I went to mouse options, then to ELAN, and from there to options. This gave me the option to disable edge swiping, which seems to have worked quite well.

Windows 10 has touchpad gestures that everyone should know. You'll need a precision touchpad to use them all, but experiment to see which ones work on your PC. We'll show you how the gestures look on a Surface Pro 3.

Precision touchpads are a new kind of touchpad designed for PCs that run Windows 8.1, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows 10. They're great for using a variety of touch gestures to get around your PC quickly. To find out if your PC has a precision touchpad, go to Settings > Devices > Mouse & touchpad. Look for the message, "Your PC has a precision touchpad." You can also change or disable gestures here.

It's pretty common for laptop users to use an external mouse over their device's touchpad. Apart from familiarity, many people claim that the mouse is more accurate and easier to handle. However, most laptops now have precision trackpads that can support advanced touchpad gestures.

Windows has its fair share of powerful touchpad gestures, yet it is one of the most underused tools. Some users know of the gestures but do not customize them to their liking, while many more are completely unaware of their existence.

Compared to the two gestures, three-finger gestures are customizable, allowing you to create swipes and taps to perform specific actions on your computer. Follow the steps below to enable this type of gesture:

A regular mouse may be easier to control, but you can create gestures that can be customized depending on your needs through your touchpad. Through touchpad gestures, you can get more out of your Windows system, especially when paired with other powerful features of Windows 11.

The QT documentation / QTCreator has an example for gestures. Apparently, the method shown using the QGesture class only works for touchscreens. I tested that straight on the example without any of my own code.

This gives x and y values for panning and zoom values for pinching the touchpad respectively. The limination with this approach is, that it gives only values in one axis while panning, i.e. x or y is zero; this is acceptable for now.

Once you enable the gestures you just need to process the events. You can also implement your own gestures but for that you need custom gesture events and gesture recognition (the documentation here is nonexistent since custom gesture recognition in itself is out of the scope of Qt). I've done this with a simple mouse so it shouldn't be much more difficult. Here is what I have. Note that the code is from 3 years ago so things might have changed. Also it's not perfect and if I remember correctly there were some errors but it should be a good start. I developed it for adding mouse gestures (using the trackpad of my notebook) to a widget.

I would check what events the touchpad produces. Qt is more than capable of processing multiple simultaneous touch events (otherwise gestures such as zoom and pan wouldn't be possible) so it all boils down to what Qt can get from a touchpad in terms of data.

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The built-in pointing devices on Windows laptops were once a source of frustration. This 2011 article in ZDNET by James Kendrick made that point in colorful language: "Why do PC trackpads suck?" He wasn't alone. Other reviewers of Windows laptops in that era had similar complaints.

That situation began to change in 2013 with the debut of the Precision Touchpad in Microsoft's Surface Pro 2 and Windows 8.1. The Precision Touchpad hardware and its accompanying built-in Windows drivers treated the touchpad as its own class of pointing device, processing taps, gestures, and movement as native actions. By 2015, high-end laptops, such as the Dell XPS 15, were getting high marks from elite reviewers for having "a trackpad as good as a MacBook."

With Windows 11, Microsoft tightened the hardware certification requirements for PCs; laptop manufacturers are now required to include Precision Touchpad technology as part of the certification process.

Using three fingers, swipe up from the bottom of the touchpad (see image, below). That gesture switches you into Task View, with a large thumbnail for each open window and virtual desktop. You can tap to choose the window you want to open, or swipe down with three fingers to return to your previous position. You can also use three fingers to swipe left or right, which begins scrolling through a display of thumbnails for all running apps; stop swiping when you get to the app you want to run.

I'm not sure how many people use the Virtual Desktop feature in Windows 11, but those who do tend to love it. It's a great way to focus on one or two apps where you're trying to get some work done. You can keep distractions like social media on a separate desktop. Using the default settings, a four-finger swipe to the left switches to the next desktop, while a four-finger swipe right switches to the previous desktop.

When you're using a two-finger gesture to scroll through webpages or documents, you might want to reverse the normal scrolling direction, so that as you swipe down, the page moves down, a behavior that's the opposite of how scrolling works when you're using scrollbars.

You'll find the Scrolling direction options on the Touchpad Settings page, under the Scroll & zoom heading. The options here refer to the actions as they apply to the scrollbar, so choose Down motion scrolls up if you want your swiping motion to match the movement of the page.

This is one of my favorite tricks. Customize the three-finger or four-finger swipe options, so that a swipe to the left or right snaps the current window to the left or right side of the display, respectively. You'll find the settings under the Advanced gestures heading (see image, below). Change Swipe left to Snap window to the left and then make the corresponding change to the Swipe right menu.

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