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Trackpad: overview

Trackpad makes AutoCAD navigate the way a laptop expects. Two-finger scroll pans instead of stepping the zoom, horizontal scroll pans sideways, pinch zooms smoothly at the cursor, and a flick glides to a stop.

Stock AutoCAD reads a two-finger scroll as a mouse wheel and answers with a jumpy stepped zoom, ignores horizontal scroll entirely, and has no two-finger pan at all: panning means holding down a middle mouse button a laptop doesn’t have.

No system variable changes that: ZOOMWHEEL only inverts which way the wheel zooms, ZOOMFACTOR only sizes the step, and MBUTTONPAN is about the middle button.

Two ways to run it

Section titled “Two ways to run it”
  • Ribbon: the Trackpad panel on the MD Plugins tab.
  • Command line: type MDTRACKPAD.

Either one arms gesture mode; running it again disarms it. The choice is remembered, so AutoCAD starts the way you left it.

The Trackpad panel on the MD Plugins ribbon tab

Command reference

Section titled “Command reference”
Command What it does
MDTRACKPAD Turns gesture mode on or off, and remembers which.
MDTRACKPADSETTINGS Walks scroll direction, pan speed, zoom speed and invert zoom in one pass.

The gestures in detail → · Settings →

The gestures

Section titled “The gestures”
Gesture What it does
Two-finger scroll ↕ Pans the view up and down
Two-finger scroll ↔ Pans sideways; on its own, AutoCAD ignores horizontal scroll entirely
Shift + scroll Pans sideways as well
Pinch Zooms at the cursor: the point you’re pointing at stays where it is
Ctrl + scroll The same zoom, without the pinch
Flick and lift The view keeps gliding for a moment, then settles

How each one behaves →

Settings

Section titled “Settings”

MDTRACKPADSETTINGS walks each preference in turn, defaulting to its current value, and writes once at the end, so a run you abandon halfway changes nothing.

Setting Controls Default
Scroll direction Reverse: the drawing slides opposite your fingers, the way Figma does it. Natural: the drawing follows your fingers, the macOS sense. Reverse
Pan speed How far a given scroll moves the view. 1.0
Zoom speed How much a given pinch magnifies. 1.0
Invert zoom Swaps which way pinching and Ctrl+scroll zoom. No
Gesture mode Whether gestures are armed at all. Toggled by MDTRACKPAD rather than by the settings command, and restored the next time AutoCAD starts. Off

Good to know

Section titled “Good to know”
  • A toggle. Dock the laptop, run MDTRACKPAD again, and the wheel returns to AutoCAD’s default behaviour.

Not in this version

Section titled “Not in this version”
  • No three- or four-finger gestures, and no rotate gesture. Two-finger scroll and pinch are the only gestures.
  • No touchscreen support: that’s AutoCAD’s own TOUCHMODE, a separate mechanism.
  • No auto-detection: the plugin never decides for you whether a trackpad is in use. You arm it with MDTRACKPAD.