There’s several useful gestures you can use when you’re without a mouse and relying on a laptop’s touchpad. If you’re not on a touchpad all the time, you may not be aware of these methods of quickly performing functions – I know I wasn’t until I re-discovered one and then wanted to refresh myself on the lot!
Swiping down with 3 fingers will take you straight to the desktop, the same way WinKey + D does.
Swiping up with 3 fingers will bring back the minimised windows from the above command. If your windows are already on screen, you’ll instead see the task view (like holding alt-tab or pressing the task view button in the Windows bar) but it will stay on screen, so you can use 1 finger to move the cursor around to select the window you want.
Swiping left or right with 3 fingers will do the same as alt-shift-tab or alt-tab – toggling between open windows in the same direction you swiped.
There’s also a 4 finger gesture for those of you who use multiple desktops via the task bar – swipe left or right to switch between each one. If you don’t have a second desktop open then your whole screen will slide around a bit but it won’t do anything.
What’s even better is that these gestures are configurable in Windows 11. Under Settings > Bluetooth & Devices > Touchpad (which won’t show if you don’t have a Touchpad!) you’ll have a three-finger gestures section. The defaults are as I described above:
You can change these defaults so left and right switch desktops rather than apps:
Or if you’re not an app/desktop switcher, change the lot to control audio:
There’s also the option to change what the Three-finger tap does:
If you don’t like the out of the box options, you can go into the ‘Advanced gestures’ section and under ‘Configure three-finger gestures’ change it to any key combination you like:
And you can configure the 4 swipe directions to perform one of the listed functions:
If you’re like me and feel much less productive when using a trackpad compared to a proper mouse, then spend a bit of time looking at what you can do and change with three-fingered and even four-fingered gestures in Windows 11.
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