Contrary to what I originally thought, there is a universal back gesture in OS X Lion…it’s just not terribly well presented. The credit for this discovery goes to the commenters from my previous post (which erroneously lamented the loss of the back gesture), one of whom was kind enough to point out that “you just have to be intelligent enough to figure out how to use it” [the gesture].
This prompted me to play around with the settings a little more, which was really the key. Basically, Lion does allow you to use a three-finger horizontal swipe to move backwards and forwards in apps, but you have to make sure that none of the other gestures are getting in the way first. This seems fairly obvious at first, so I thought all I had to do was load up Trackpad in System Preferences, head to the More Gestures tab, and make sure that nothing else was using the same three-finger gesture as “Swipe between pages”. However, as it turns out, you also have to make sure that “Three finger drag” in the first section of the Trackpad settings (Point & Click) is turned OFF. Three Finger Drag is apparently a bit of a bully, and you simply won’t be able to use the back gesture correctly until you turn the former off.
The real issue here then is that OS X Lion hasn’t done a good enough job of pointing out possible Trackpad mapping conflicts. The way the Trackpad settings are set up right now is similar to allowing the return and the delete key to be mapped to the same button without issuing any sort of warning.
So for those who simply want a strict set of instructions to get their beloved back gesture back in Lion (so that it’s just like it was in Snow Leopard):
- System Preferences -> Trackpad
- Point & Click tab: Three Finger Drag OFF
- More Gestures tab: Swipe Between Pages ON (“two fingers” or “two or three fingers”), Swipe between full-screen apps ON (four fingers) or OFF (cut your fingers off)
As a final note, if you’re a user of Lion’s new “natural scrolling” and Safari, and you stick to only “three fin you’ll very quickly notice that changing the “Swipe between pages” setting to anything but “two fingers” or “two or three fingers” will kill that cool panning animation in Safari. You’ll also find that the back and forward swipe directions (e.g. swipe left to go back) are still stuck using the Snow Leopard metaphor.
Not quite Lion “natural”, but at least it works.
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