Introducing Threefingers

When I switched to Mac from Windows years back, one thing I miss from my old Windows behaviour was the three-finger tap on the trackpad for middle click. This was very annoying, as I used to open a lot of browser tabs at once and close them very quickly.

The mac os way of having to find the close button, nor the keyboard shortcuts, didn’t work for me. I didn’t want to use both my hands on the macbook when I’m casually reading things.

I discovered this fantastic app called middleclick, which served me for the last couple of years. One thing that annoys me in this app is that it lives in my status bar. With so little space in the status bar.

Threefingers

I saw this library MultitouchSupport, which exposes a private Macos API called MultitouchSupport

I decided to take matters into my own hands and create something that can run as a background service, providing the same functionality. After some trial and error, I got it working and decided to publish it as a brew formula. Threefingers is written in swift, and distributed as binary with homebrew

brew tap geongeorge/tap
brew install threefingers
threefingers setup

Threefingers repo

Middleclick did have this functionality

There was a way to hide the status bar icon in middle-click: You can CMD-drag the icon out of the status bar.

I didn’t discover it until later, but I liked my approach better(for myself) because I didn’t want something with a UI running all the time, and this just fits my use case very well.