A pal of mine showed me how she’d set up her MacBook to allow her to just gently tap on the trackpad to send a “click” to the operating system, as if she’d clicked on the mouse button. Very cool. How do I set up my MacBook Pro to let me do the same thing?
You’re talking about what Apple calls “trackpad gestures” and all of these settings — and quite a bit more — are available through the rather confusingly named “Keyboard and Mouse” control panel.
Start by going to Apple –> System Preferences… and choose Keyboard and Mouse. It’ll look like this:
(Actually, the last section, “illuminate keyboard in low light conditions”, will only show up if you have a MacBook that has the lighted keyboard feature. I do, as you can see, and it’s pretty darn cool. I couldn’t imagine disabling it!)
Click on the Trackpad tab and you’ll finally see what you seek:
You can see where the cursor is pointing: select “Clicking” and you’re in business, ready to impress the heck out of your friends with your Mac tweaking prowess! If you want to learn about the many other options here, I strongly recommend you check out the keyword “Trackpad” in the Apple help system for the reference articles.
I have the opposite problem, I need to stop all of the other touch requirements or make them lower their severity.
If I just leave my finger there for a moment, it switchs
Hey, I’m so glad I came across this post. My trackpad somehow got unprogrammed and I was about to do some crazy stuff to my computer based on other posts when it was this SIMPLE! Thank you.
Thanks, this helps a lot. I never thought i can do the whole sha bang not wanting to hear the track pad being tap all the time. It gets annoying, but just want to drop by and say thanks!
Since we purchased our MacBook Pro in November 2010, we’ve had the trackpad set to do 2 finger scrolling & 2 finger right click. Yesterday we lost it! Everything is still set in the options correctly, but it won’t work. Any ideas how to fix this??? I can’t live like this!
Thanks so much for this info. I can finally use the trackpad w/o that annoying sound. Thanks very much for being a resource!
How DO you get the track pad to respond to tapping on the MacBook, when in XP?
Dave, any solution for enabling trackpad problem in Macbook Air booted in Vista?
How do I set a background on the macbook?
Can you use track pad clicking if you are running windows xp on my Mac Book Air,,,,,it seems to work in os but not when I switch to Windows
Thank you so much for this post! I’ve been a Macbook owner for almost two months now and the one thing I was missing was the trackpad tapping. I think I just fell in love with my Macbook all over again 🙂