How to make your own trackpad gestures on a Mac

6 October 2026 · 7 min read

macOS does not let you make your own trackpad gestures. System Settings lets you switch Apple’s gestures on or off and choose three or four fingers for some of them, but you cannot give a gesture a new job. For that you need a gesture app: in Trill you press New gesture, do the gesture on the trackpad, and pick what it should do.

This guide covers what macOS already lets you change, how to choose gestures that will not misfire, and how to record and test one of your own.

What macOS lets you change

Everything Apple offers is in System Settings, under Trackpad, across three tabs: Point & Click, Scroll & Zoom and More Gestures. The More Gestures tab holds the ones people usually mean, among them:

Swipe between full-screen applications, which also moves between Spaces, with three or four fingers left or right.
Mission Control, with three or four fingers swiping up.
App Exposé, with three or four fingers swiping down.
Notification Center, by swiping left from the right edge with two fingers.
Show Desktop, by spreading your thumb and three fingers.

You can turn each one off, and for some you can pick the number of fingers, but the list of jobs is fixed. There is no way to make a four-finger tap close a tab, or a swipe in one app mean something different from the same swipe in another.

These settings still matter when you add your own gestures, because macOS keeps them. If Mission Control is on a four-finger swipe up, that swipe belongs to macOS. Moving Apple’s gestures to three fingers, or switching off the ones you never use, frees the other motions for your own. A good first step is to open the More Gestures tab and note which finger counts macOS is using.

Choose a gesture that will not misfire

The gestures that work best are the ones you will never make by accident. Typing, scrolling and pointing all use one or two fingers, so gestures with three, four or five fingers stay out of their way.

In Trill, version 1.7.3, New gesture records these on the trackpad:

Taps with 3, 4 or 5 fingers.
TipTap: rest one finger on the trackpad and tap beside it with another, to the left or to the right.
Swipes with 3, 4 or 5 fingers, up, down, left or right.
Edge swipes: swipe in from an edge with one or two fingers.
Corner clicks: a real click with one finger in any of the four corners of the trackpad.
Edge slides: slide one finger along the left, right or top edge, in steps (never the bottom edge).

Keyboard shortcuts can run actions too; you make those on the Shortcuts screen by pressing the keys. On a mouse, Trill uses only buttons 4 and 5, which its Everyday set makes back and forward.

Some honest limits: Trill does not do pinch or rotate, drawn shapes, or one- and two-finger taps (two fingers are already busy with scrolling and right-clicking). If drawing gestures or gestures on a Magic Mouse are what you are after, BetterTouchTool covers those, along with far more devices and more than 600 actions.

A few rules of thumb from setting these up:

Taps are the fastest. A four- or five-finger tap is over in an instant, with no direction to get wrong.
Five fingers are the hardest to make by accident. Nobody rests five fingertips on a trackpad while typing.
Slides suit values that go up and down, like volume or brightness, because each step is separate.
Corners suit things you press on purpose, like locking the screen, since a corner click takes a deliberate press.

Record a gesture by doing it

You do not pick a gesture from a list of names in Trill. You do it, and Trill works out what it was.

Click Trill’s icon in the menu bar and choose Open Trill.
Press New gesture.
Do the gesture on the trackpad, the way you will do it every day. Trill names the gesture it saw, for example a 5-finger tap.
Pick what it does from the list of actions.
Choose where it works: everywhere, or only in the apps you pick.
Read the rule back. Trill writes it as a sentence, such as “In Safari, a 5-finger tap plays or pauses music”, so you can check it means what you meant.

Then try it. On a Force Touch trackpad, Trill taps back with a tick under your fingers the moment it recognises the gesture, before the action runs. That tick is the quickest way to tell a gesture that was not recognised apart from an action that did nothing. A separate haptic, Nothing here, tells you the gesture was recognised but has no job in the app in front. On a trackpad without Force Touch, Trill shows each gesture on screen instead. The full set of haptics is in feel a tick when a gesture works.

Trill needs Accessibility permission to press keys and clicks for you; macOS asks once. Without it, gestures can still open apps, files and links.

What a gesture can do

Trill has more than a hundred actions. The ones that cover the most ground:

Press any keyboard shortcut. Any menu command that has a shortcut can go on a gesture, in any app. This one action does most of the work.
Type text, such as an email address or a sign-off you write all day.
Open an app, a file or a link.
Run an Apple Shortcut, an AppleScript or a shell command, for anything the menus do not reach.
Control music, volume and brightness.
Switch tabs and move windows: halves, thirds, quarters and sixths, centre, and next display.
Mac features such as Mission Control, App Exposé, Show Desktop, Spotlight, Lock Screen, screenshots, Dark Mode, dictation, emoji and Look Up.
Clicks: middle, right and double click. A three-finger tap set to middle click is the gesture Trill’s welcome has you try first, covered in how to middle click on a Mac trackpad.

One gesture, a different job in each app

A gesture app earns its keep when the same motion does the right thing wherever you are. In Trill, each gesture works everywhere or only in the apps you choose, and you can record the same gesture again for another app with a different action.

Trill’s ready-made Gesture Sets show how this works in practice. A TipTap to the right is the next tab in Safari, Chrome and other browsers, the next tab in Xcode, VS Code and Terminal, and redo in Pages, Notes and other writing apps. A four-finger tap opens a new tab in a browser and starts dictation in a writing app. One motion to learn, and it means the obvious thing in each place.

If you would rather not build these from scratch, switch on a set. There are six (Everyday, Browser, Windows, Media, Writing and Developer), each a few gestures for one kind of work, switched on with one click. The welcome screen suggests the sets that fit the apps already on your Mac. You can then record your own gestures alongside them.

When your gesture is one macOS already uses

Remember the More Gestures tab. If you record a four-finger swipe left, say for a left-half window, and macOS is using four fingers to switch Spaces, as it may be out of the box, both would fire: the window snaps and the whole desktop slides away.

Trill checks for this. It keeps your gesture off, marks it “Blocked by macOS” and says why, and offers the fix in one click: turn the gesture off in macOS, or pick another gesture. Trill changes a macOS setting only when you click that fix. Every change is written down, and Put back returns them exactly as they were.

Questions

Can I make custom trackpad gestures on a Mac without an app?

No. System Settings, Trackpad lets you switch Apple’s gestures on or off and change finger counts for some of them, but it cannot assign a gesture to an action of your own.

Can I make a gesture that only works in one app?

Yes. When you record a gesture in Trill you choose everywhere or only the apps you pick, and the same gesture can do something different in another app.

Can I copy my gestures to another Mac?

Yes. Export saves your gestures, shortcuts and layouts as a file, and Import loads it on the other Mac. Scripts and app links in a loaded file stay off until you switch them on, and Trill saves the current setup in Backups first. One licence key works on up to 3 Macs.

What does it cost?

Trill is $29 once, not a subscription, and free for 24 hours from the first launch with every feature. It runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs.