The gestures

Once MDTRACKPAD is on, the trackpad drives the view directly.

Panning

Two fingers, any direction. Vertical scroll pans up and down; horizontal scroll pans sideways. Sideways is the half AutoCAD has never had: it ignores horizontal scroll entirely, so on a stock install those fingers do nothing at all.

If your trackpad or driver doesn’t send horizontal scroll, Shift + scroll pans sideways too.

Which way the drawing goes is the Scroll direction setting, and it applies to both axes at once. See Settings.

Flick and lift your fingers and the pan glides to a stop over about half a second. Scroll again mid-glide and the new input takes over immediately rather than fighting the momentum.

Note

On a very heavy drawing AutoCAD can’t redraw fast enough to carry a long glide, so the glide gets shorter instead of crawling. Momentum degrades to none rather than to a slow drift you have to wait out.

Zooming

Pinch, or Ctrl + scroll. Both zoom at the cursor: the drawing point under the crosshair stays under the crosshair, so you point at what you want to look at and pinch toward it. That’s the difference from AutoCAD’s wheel zoom, which steps in fixed jumps.

Pinch and Ctrl+scroll are the same gesture as far as Windows is concerned, so both work on any precision trackpad, and Ctrl+scroll works with a mouse as well.

Zooming eases the same way panning does, so a pinch settles rather than snapping.

Panning distance doesn’t change with the zoom level: a given scroll moves the view by the same fraction of the screen whether you’re looking at a title block or a bolt.

Where gestures apply

Gestures follow the cursor, not the keyboard focus. While the cursor sits over the drawing area, scrolling pans and pinching zooms. Move it over the command line, a docked palette, a tool palette or anything floating above the canvas, and the wheel is handed straight back to AutoCAD, so scrolling a properties list still scrolls the list.

The coordinate readout stays live while the view moves, and an active command’s rubber band redraws against the moving view rather than freezing until you move a finger.

Undo

A gesture costs one undo step, the way a ZOOM does, not one per frame of movement. Press Ctrl+Z once, or click the Undo arrow on the Quick Access Toolbar, and the view goes back to where the gesture started, however far you scrolled and however long the glide ran. The undo after that is undoing your drawing edits again.

A pause starts a new gesture, so three separate flicks are three steps.

Two limits worth knowing

• Tiled viewports. Gestures always drive the current viewport. With VPORTS split into several, hovering an inactive viewport still pans and zooms the active one; make the viewport current first.
• Perspective views. These keep AutoCAD’s own wheel behaviour, untouched. Its wheel moves the camera through the scene, which is not something a pan-and-zoom gesture can stand in for.