Apple Gives You 15 Trackpad Gestures. Here's How to Add Your Own.

macOS gives you about fifteen trackpad gestures out of the box, and exactly zero ways to add another one. There is no setting, no hidden preference, and no public API that lets you bind a custom trackpad movement to an action. If you want a gesture Apple didn’t ship, you need a third-party app — and the app you pick depends entirely on which input device you’re willing to use.

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The 15 gestures Apple actually ships

Before you can understand why adding your own is hard, it helps to see what’s already there. Open System Settings → Trackpad and you get three panels. Here is the full inventory on a modern MacBook running macOS Sonoma or Sequoia:

Panel	Gesture	Fingers	Action
Point & Click	Tap to click	1	Click without pressing
	Secondary click	2 (or bottom corner)	Right-click
	Look up & data detectors	Force click	Dictionary / preview
Scroll & Zoom	Scroll direction: natural	2	Page follows fingers
	Zoom in or out	2 (pinch)	Magnify
	Smart zoom	2 (double-tap)	Zoom to fit
	Rotate	2	Rotate images
More Gestures	Swipe between pages	2	Back / forward
	Swipe between desktops	3 or 4	Switch Spaces
	Notification Center	2 (from right edge)	Open notifications
	Mission Control	3 or 4 (spread)	All windows
	App Exposé	3 or 4 (down)	Current app windows
	Launchpad	Pinch with thumb + 3	Open app grid
	Show desktop	Spread with thumb + 3	Reveal desktop

That is fifteen. There is one more — three-finger drag — but it lives in System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options, not the main Trackpad panel. Count it and you have sixteen. Apple draws the line at about fifteen in the UI most people open.

Notice what every entry has in common: the gesture is fixed, the action is fixed, and the binding is Apple’s decision, not yours. You can toggle each one on or off. You cannot change what it does.

The ceiling: why you can’t add a 17th gesture

This is the part most “add custom trackpad gestures” tutorials skip. It is not that the setting is buried — it does not exist.

Apple exposes the trackpad through the HID (Human Interface Device) layer and its own private multitouch framework. That framework is private API. Third-party apps are not allowed to read raw multi-touch data and bind their own gestures to it. The reasons are reasonable from Apple’s side — trackpad input is a security and accessibility surface, and arbitrary apps watching every finger placement is exactly the kind of thing macOS sandboxing tries to prevent — but the effect on you is concrete: the set of trackpad gestures is closed.

What third-party tools can read is higher-level: pointer position, button state, scroll events, modifier keys. That is enough to build mouse gestures (hold a button, move the pointer, recognize the shape), but it is not enough to distinguish “three fingers swiping left” from “four fingers swiping left” the way the OS can. This is why the custom-gesture space splits down the middle.

Two paths to custom gestures, split by device

You cannot add a native trackpad gesture. You can add custom gestures through a third-party app, and which app makes sense depends on which device you keep your hand on.

Path 1: Stay on the trackpad — BetterTouchTool

If the trackpad is your primary input and you want custom trackpad gestures, BetterTouchTool is the established answer. It reads the multitouch stream through the Input Monitoring permission (granted under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Input Monitoring) and lets you bind custom taps, clicks, and movements to actions.

The trade-off is the toolbox problem. BetterTouchTool is a general-purpose automation app that happens to do trackpad gestures alongside window snapping, shortcut remapping, Touch Bar customization, and a dozen other things. Configuration lives behind a dense UI, and the number of options is large enough that the learning curve is real. It works. It is powerful. It is not a focused tool.

For a deeper comparison of that philosophy — focused app versus toolbox — our BetterTouchTool vs Curflow breakdown covers setup time, feature overlap, and pricing.

Path 2: Switch to the mouse — custom mouse gestures

If you already use a mouse (external trackpad users, desktop Mac users, anyone whose hand leaves the trackpad during the day), mouse gestures sidestep the closed trackpad problem entirely. A mouse gesture works on primitives any app can read: hold a button, move the pointer, recognize the shape, fire the action. No private multitouch API required.

This is where Curflow lives. You hold a modifier (a mouse button or a key), draw a shape — a line, a curve, a triangle — and the shape triggers an action: switch apps, close a tab, jump to a desktop, run a shortcut. The recognition is intent-based, so the shape does not have to be drawn precisely. You can read about the difference between browser-level and system-level gesture engines to see why a system-level mouse engine reaches actions a trackpad cannot.

The honest limitation: Curflow is a mouse-gesture app, not a trackpad-gesture app. If you want a custom trackpad gesture, BetterTouchTool is the correct tool. Curflow is the answer to a different question — “what do I do when I’m on the mouse and I want custom gestures Apple never shipped?” — and for a lot of power users that is the question that actually matters.

Why people move beyond the trackpad at all

If the trackpad is so good, why look elsewhere? Three reasons come up again and again, and they are the reasons the mouse-gesture category exists at all.

Ergonomics. Continuous trackpad use is a known source of wrist and finger strain. The pinching, spreading, and multi-finger holds are fine for a few minutes and punishing over a full workday. A lot of the people searching for “custom trackpad gestures” are actually looking for a way to get gesture power without keeping their hand cramped on glass. If that is the underlying problem, the answer is not more trackpad gestures — it is offloading repetitive input to a mouse.

Multi-monitor reach. A trackpad is mapped to a single glass surface. The moment you add a second monitor, the spatial model that makes trackpad gestures intuitive starts to break down — swiping “right” no longer means “right monitor” cleanly. Mouse gestures, drawn on a 2D pointer surface, map naturally to a multi-monitor layout. See how mouse gestures bring order to multi-monitor chaos for the full breakdown.

Vocabulary size. Apple’s trackpad is constrained by ergonomics: three-finger and four-finger gestures are close to the ceiling of what a human hand can reliably distinguish without looking. A mouse gesture vocabulary, drawn as shapes, scales to dozens of distinct, memorable actions. The limit is muscle memory, not finger count. Why keyboard shortcuts hit a ceiling explains the same scaling logic from the shortcut side.

A custom mouse-gesture setup you can build in two minutes

If you decided the mouse path fits, here is a starter vocabulary. These are the four shapes most people draw on day one, each mapped to a high-frequency action:

Shape	Action	Why this shape
← left sweep	Previous desktop / Space	Motion matches direction
→ right sweep	Next desktop / Space	Motion matches direction
↑ up sweep	Mission Control	Opens the overview
O circle	Switch to browser	Shape is easy to remember

Start with four. Do not map twenty gestures on day one — the muscle memory will not hold, and you will revert to the trackpad or keyboard out of frustration. After about a week, add shapes for your two or three most-used apps. After two weeks, the gestures stop feeling like gestures and start feeling like part of the pointer, the same way double-click stopped feeling like a trick decades ago.

The reason a focused setup matters here is the same reason a focused app does: a small, well-practiced vocabulary beats a large, half-remembered one. Twenty gestures you never internalize is a worse outcome than four you draw without thinking.

FAQ

Can I add a custom trackpad gesture natively, without any third-party app?

No. macOS exposes no setting or public API for custom trackpad gestures. The trackpad gesture set is closed at the OS level. The only way to add your own is through a third-party app that reads input through the Input Monitoring permission.

Will Apple ever open up custom trackpad gestures?

Probably not in a way that matters. Apple treats trackpad multitouch as a private, security-sensitive surface. Shortcuts and automation are expanding (Shortcuts.app, App Intents), but raw trackpad gesture binding has remained closed for over a decade across every macOS version.

Is BetterTouchTool or mouse gestures better for me?

If your hand lives on the trackpad, BetterTouchTool. If your hand lives on a mouse — external trackpad, desktop Mac, or anyone who reaches for the mouse during the day — mouse gestures. They answer different questions; comparing them directly comes down to which input device you want to keep your hand on.

Do mouse gestures work on the built-in trackpad too?

A mouse-gesture app listens to pointer motion and button state, which the trackpad also produces — so technically yes, you can trigger a mouse gesture by moving the trackpad pointer while holding a modifier. But the ergonomics are worse than using a mouse, and you lose the multitouch gestures you already have. Mouse gestures are designed around a mouse.

How many custom gestures is too many?

Roughly eight to ten. Above that, recall overhead competes with the speed benefit. The gestures you actually internalize are the ones you use daily; map those well and leave the rest as keyboard shortcuts.

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Apple ships a trackpad with fifteen gestures and a closed system for adding more. That is not going to change. What can change is which input device you put your hand on — and once you’re willing to move past the glass, the gesture vocabulary opens up to whatever your hand can draw.

The trackpad is excellent for the fifteen things it does. For the sixteenth, you need a different tool.

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Want to build a custom mouse-gesture vocabulary on your Mac? Curflow is a native macOS app — hold a button, draw a shape, trigger any action. 14-day free trial, per-app mappings, SwiftUI performance.

Read next:

• BetterTouchTool vs Curflow: setup time, features, and pricing compared
• Browser gestures vs system gestures: why extensions aren’t enough
• Multi-monitor Mac chaos? How mouse gestures bring order
• Tendinitis from keyboard shortcuts: how mouse gestures helped
• Mouse gestures vs keyboard shortcuts: when each one wins