Plugin 04 · Essentials
Trackpad
AutoCAD’s wheel handling assumes a mouse: on a trackpad, two-finger scroll steps the zoom in jumps, horizontal scroll does nothing at all, and two-finger pan doesn’t exist. Trackpad answers both wheel messages itself: scroll pans, pinch zooms at the cursor, a flick glides and settles. No system variable gets you there: ZOOMWHEEL only inverts the zoom direction and ZOOMFACTOR only sizes its step.
1 command · Trackpad panel · AutoCAD 2025+ · perpetual licence
Overview
What it does
- Two-finger scroll pans, sideways as well, a message AutoCAD otherwise ignores
- Pinch or Ctrl+scroll zooms continuously at the cursor, not in notches
- A flick glides and settles, and shortens rather than crawling on a heavy drawing
- One toggle: plug in a mouse and MDTRACKPAD hands the wheel back
Run every command from the Trackpad panel on the shared MD Plugins ribbon tab, from the right-click menu, or by typing it, with AutoCAD's own autocomplete icons.
In detail
How it earns its place.
The gestures your laptop already sends
Two-finger scroll arrives as one wheel message, horizontal scroll as a second one AutoCAD discards, and a pinch as Ctrl+wheel: Windows sends it that way, so no touch API is involved. All three are answered by moving the view directly, which is why the drawing finally behaves like every other window on the machine.
Zoom lands where you are pointing
The view scales around the cursor and accumulates continuously instead of in fixed notches, so zooming in and back out returns the view you started from rather than somewhere near it. Twisted and parallel-projection 3D views come along unchanged: the gesture moves the screen, whatever the camera is doing.
Armed only where it belongs
A scroll over a palette, the command line or anything outside the drawing area is left to AutoCAD untouched, as is a perspective view. The gesture mode is off until you run MDTRACKPAD and remembered afterwards, so a docked laptop keeps the wheel zoom it has always had.
Trackpad
A direct download is not published yet. The plugin remains available on the Autodesk App Store.
$99 CAD one-time: perpetual licence, one machine, works offline.
See pricingInstalling
Install it in a minute
- 01
Close AutoCAD, run the installer
Its files are locked while AutoCAD is open, so close it first.
- 02
Trust the publisher, once
On first launch AutoCAD names MD Automation and asks whether to load it. Tick “Always trust applications from MD Automation”: every MD plugin loads silently afterwards.
- 03
Start the trial
Run
MDLICENSEMANAGER, open the Plugins tab, click Start trial. 15 days, no account, no payment.
AutoCAD 2025+ (64-bit Windows). Also on the Autodesk App Store: same build, published here the day it ships. All downloads.
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