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I recently started using a MacBook Air and find some of the gestures such as the double click zoom in Safari extremely useful, I'm aware I can zoom normally using cmd - (+) but find the gesture zoom much better. Can I simulate the touchpad or another way to do this on my iMac.

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  • What exactly do you mean by "simulate the touchpad"?
    – Tuesday
    Mar 26, 2012 at 1:28
  • Use the same gestures on my laptop touchpad with my desktop mouse. I imagine OS X has limited this to the touchpad only as I can't see any system preferences that allow you to use the gestures such as the double click zoom or triple click for definitions etc. without a trackpad. If you could emulate (maybe a better word to describe it) the trackpad to use those gestures or an alternative way.
    – Vash
    Mar 26, 2012 at 2:02
  • What is your mouse? That's really the key ingredient.
    – Tuesday
    Mar 26, 2012 at 10:55
  • Logitech G700 paired up with SteerMouse
    – Vash
    Mar 27, 2012 at 2:30

2 Answers 2

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You can use a Magic Trackpad with your iMac - that will let you perform all the same gestures as you use on your MacBook Air.

There are even neat accessories to make it one unit with your Apple Wireless Keyboard. The ones I know about are the Twelve South "Magic Wand" and the Henge "Clique".

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  • My current mouse has extra buttons that I use for expose and show desktop etc so I'm quite happy with that. I can see it being a bit counter productive having to take my hand off the keyboard to use the Magic Trackpad but I could be wrong.
    – Vash
    Mar 26, 2012 at 1:56
  • There's nothing to say you can't continue to use the mouse, I do. The Wireless + Trackpad unit is still only as wide as the conventional keyboard with number pad.
    – Adam Eberbach
    Mar 26, 2012 at 2:02
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BetterTouchTool does exactly what I was after, you can set keyboard and mouse shortcuts to emulate gestures and a bunch of other stuff. You will also need SteerMouse if you want to map the buttons on your mouse to keystrokes then assign them inside BetterTouchTool to gestures etc.

After some testing it's more of just a zoom not smart zoom but still works quite well; I'm happy enough with it.

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  • BetterTouchTool now requires you to buy a license and can be downloaded at folivora.ai
    – cagcoach
    Apr 30, 2022 at 15:47

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