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serr

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Mar 8, 2010
257
29
Sierra introduced this new trackpad feature where the trackpad responds differently to a light tap vs a hard tap when in tap to click mode. I still don't have my head wrapped around how this is intended to be used. Sometimes it also goes into drag lock mode randomly (probably operator error).

I understand that Apple had/has a bug in this? They said so in a chat with them a few weeks ago now anyway. I posted once about this a while back but calling it a "drag lock feature" in the subject as I was confused.

I stated that a light tap did the new thing and you needed a heavy tap to do the normal thing. That's not quite right it turns out. A VERY light tap is normal. (ie. shift-click and command-click do the expected) Then a 'normal' tap (to me anyway) does the new feature. (It's obviously seeing this as a hard tap vs a light one.) A harder tap then comes full circle and goes back to normal operation. (This suggests the hard tap is being seen as out of range is what I'm going to guess here.) This 'normal' tap deselects anything already selected in a Finder window for example, and selects the single thing you just clicked on when doing either a shift-click or command-click. Sometimes it's then in drag mode following that. I'm honestly not sure how to repeat that part at will!

OK, so Apple said this new feature was still buggy. I'd agree with that!

Does anyone know how to just turn this off? Some flag to set with a command line? I don't like this. I don't see a use for it. It's just a "Let's make the trackpad seem like a Windows machine" feature as far as I'm concerned. And it's gonna turn into a "and that's why I rolled back to 10.11" feature pretty soon!
 
Force Touch! They call it force touch.

Alright, so how to disable it?

I see pictures of the preferences panel with a checkbox option which I can't get to appear here. I read that if the option doesn't appear, that means the trackpad is not compatible with the feature. Well... All the more reason to want to disable the feature! Right?!

I've seen postings about turning it off for only Garageband in that scenario with a Terminal command.

How to disable this globally?

I've tried the expected holding the Option key when launching System Preferences as well as when selecting Trackpad within System Preferences and neither will make the option visible.


EDIT:
SOLVED!

Code:
defaults write com.apple.finder SupportForceTouchTrackpad -bool no

For the Finder so far anyway. Looks like you need to disable this per app.
 
Last edited:
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