How to customize touchpad gestures in Windows 11

All Windows 11 laptops have a precision touchpad, which means you can customize certain gestures to quickly access common features. Here’s how.

The touchpad is an essential part of any laptop, replacing the traditional mouse with a low-profile solution that still allows you to point, click, and do everything you’d expect to do. For many years, touchpads on Windows laptops weren’t that great, since each one was made by a different company and had different drivers, not to mention they were often too small and uncomfortable. Thankfully, that’s changed in recent years.

Touchpads on Windows 11 laptops not only tend to be larger, but they also support custom gestures that let you do more than just replace your mouse. These gestures can make it easier to change between virtual desktops or adjust the volume, for example. In the past, these would have been different for each laptop and some may not have even supported them, but thanks to the introduction of precision touchpads, which are now standard on Windows laptops, you’re pretty much guaranteed to have support. If you’re interested in customizing touchpad gestures on your laptop, here’s how to do it.

Customize basic touchpad gestures in Windows 11

There are two tiers of customization available, and we’ll start with the more basic one. This lets you choose to tweak the way one- and two-finger gestures work, and also set custom gestures for three and four fingers. Here’s how to do it:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Click Bluetooth & devices in the side menu.
3. Choose Touchpad.

   

4. You’ll be directly in the touchpad gesture customization
   • Under Taps, you can set the touchpad sensitivity and disable some of the default behaviors. For example, tapping with one finger generally equates to a mouse click, but you can disable that if you want to use the physical button on the touchpad instead.
   • Under Scroll & zoom, you can disable the ability to scroll by moving two fingers up and down on the touchpad. You can also use the Scrolling direction setting to choose which way scrolling works based on the direction you move your fingers. By default, a touchpad acts like a phone, where moving your finger down scrolls up.
   • Three-finger gestures let you choose what happens when you swipe or tap three fingers on the touchpad.
     • For swipe gestures, you can choose Nothing, Switch apps and show desktop, Switch desktops and show desktop, or Change audio and volume. The gestures available for each option are shown when you select them.
     • For taps, you can choose Nothing, Open Search, Notification Center, Play/pause, and Middle mouse button.
   • Four-finger gestures let you choose what happens when swiping or tapping four fingers on the touchpad. The options are the same as for three-finger gestures.
5. Changes are saved and applied automatically.

This is the method that makes the most sense to most people because swipe gestures are grouped under a unifying setting, so the actions are all related to each other. For example, the Change audio and volume option lets you adjust the volume by swiping up or down and skip tracks by swiping sideways. However, if you have a specific workflow and you want each gesture to do something completely different, you can customize more advanced gestures.

Customize advanced gestures

Advanced touchpad customizations let you assign custom actions to every swipe gesture with three or four fingers on the touchpad. Instead of multiple actions grouped together, you can individually choose custom actions for swiping up, down, left, and right, as well as tapping. You also have more actions you can assign to these gestures. Here’s how to use them:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Click Bluetooth & devices in the side menu.
3. Choose Touchpad.
4. Click Advanced gestures at the bottom of the page.

   

5. Under Configure three-finger gestures and Configure four-finger gestures, you can choose individual actions for each gesture with either three or four fingers. This makes a total of ten custom actions you can set.

   

   • For taps, there are a total of seven actions that can be assigned. For gestures, there are a total of 19 actions to choose from for each gesture.
6. One of these actions is a Custom shortcut that lets you record a keyboard shortcut that you want to be executed when performing the associated gesture or tap. For this:
   1. Click Start recording to begin recording the keys you want to be registered with the shortcut.
   2. Press the keys you want to be registered when you perform the touchpad gesture.
   3. Click Stop recording and the shortcut will be saved.

      

7. Changes are saved and applied automatically.

These advanced gestures are ideal for proficient users that want specific actions done more quickly without being limited to the templates provided in the general settings. You have a lot more flexibility here, and you can greatly boost your productivity to make use of these options.

If your device doesn’t just have a touchpad but also a touchscreen, Windows 11 version 22H2 also introduced some touch gestures you can use. You can’t customize them that much, but you can check out our guide on Windows 11 touch gestures to learn more.