MacOS: Getting the trackpad to behave like Synaptics

This is a small note for myself, in case I have to reconfigure a MacBook to get it to behave how I like. I should point out that I utterly hate trackpads, but if I’m stuck using one I’m used to certain behaviour and I wanted the MBP’s pad to emulate that as best I could.

Multi-finger Scroll direction

My Synaptics pad on my Windows laptop supported multi-finger scroll, which is super useful. However by default, the MBP’s trackpad scrolls the other direction - this is changeable using the “Scroll Direction” feature under System Preferences; Trackpad; Scrolling and Zoom. Unfortunately, as at High Sierra, this is linked to the scroll wheel behaviour on the mouse, so it reverses it as well! How idiotic. Nothing to it, I had to reverse the direction of the synaptics pad and hope I get used to it fairly soon.

Tap to drag

This one took a while to find, as it’s not in the trackpad settings but in the Accessibility; Mouse and Trackpad; Trackpad Options. Check “enable dragging”, “without drag lock” to get the same behaviour as the Synaptics on my Windows PC.

Secondary Click

Simply set it to “click in the bottom right corner”.