Drawing/mouse gesture not working

As the subject line says, drawing/mouse gesture is not working for me. This is the first time I am trying the feature, and I wish I could give more information, but I can't say anything other than that it is not working.

I have looked at the tutorial video, I have tried trouble shooting by tinkering with various settings within BTT.

The trigger is a simple "up" motion, and the action is command + arrow up for going all the way up to the top of the page in web browsers.

When I start the trigger by holding down the right mouse button and dragging up, it shows the drawing stroke, so something is being recognized, but when I let go of the right mouse button, the drawing never gets recognized and no actio is triggered. No HUD ever shows (I enabled "show when drawing recognized" in the trigger settings and configured the HUD overlay). "Required ecognition certainty to trigger" is set to the lowest possible value, 0.2.

Checking or unchecking "cancel recognition if mouse outside of drawing area" from the BTT settings doesn't help.


Affected input device (e.g. MacBook Trackpad, Magic Mouse/Trackpad, Touch Bar, etc.):slight_smile:

Mouse


Screenshots


Device information:

  • Type of Mac: M2 MBP
  • macOS version: Latest, 26.5
  • BetterTouchTool version: Latest, alpha 6.522.

Additional information (e.g. crash logs, related issues, etc.) :

N/A

you have it configured to only trigger while FN is being pressed, is this intentional?

Thanks for the response.

I had it checked when I took the screenshot when I was trying various stuff. It still doesn't work when I uncheck it.

Again, the gesture initiates, drawing stroke shows on the screen (whether or not only trigger while FN (or any other key) is being pressed checked, as long as I press the appropriate key, as applicable, while initiating drawing), but no drawing ever seems to get registered and triggers the configured action.

the drawing recognition will always start if at least one drawing is configured, if it doesn’t recognize your drawing nothing will happen after releasing the mouse press

have you already tried recording another drawing? maybe something went wrong when you recorded it

I record drawing by opening the drawing recording dialogue, mouse click left at the starting location, drag upward a bit and let the left mouse button go. And then I click "Add another variation . . ." button and repeat the process a few more times, adjust "Required recognition certainly to trigger" all the way down to 0.2, name the gesture, and click "Finish & Save Gesture".

You saw in the screenshot I included, it's just an upward stroke - as simple as it gets.

I tried other shapes and it doesn't work either.

Is there anything I am missing here? Does the fact that the drawing recogniztion starts rule out the possibility that I did not give sufficient privilege to the app from Mac Settings? In any case, I think I gave all the permissions that are asked for by the app.

setup sounds good, but I have no idea how that would not work.

If you want you can go to Help => Export Diagnostic Debug Information and send the result to me via andreas@folivora.ai, then I can check whether anything is wrong with the setup.

Hi, I put this off for a while, and was trying again after the latest update, and the update seems to have fixed the mouse drawing gestures, at least partly - thank you.

Now some mouse drawing gestures work, but the feature still does not work fully as expected.

Notice that I have the following mouse dragging gestures set up for Safari:

a. Left (cmd [ / Back),

b. Right (cmd ] / Forward),

c. Up (Home / Top of Page),

d. Down (End / Bottom of Page),

e. Down-Up (cmd R / Reload Page)

f. Down-Right (cmd w / Close Tab).

First, notice how the thumbnails on the left side of the item rows for Left and Right are the same, and how the thumbnails for Up and Down are the same. I most definitely configured Left differently from Right, and Up differently from Down (I confirmed one more time while drafting this message - I am 100% sure - and you can you yourself from the screen recording that I have different Up, Down, Left and Right gestures). I tried updating the gestures several times, but the thumbnails won't update.

Second, notice how from the screen recording, the gestures Left, Right, Up and Down seem to be properly recognized and execute the assigned actions. However, notice that Down-Right is not recognized at all, and how Down-Left (which is not a gesture that I configured anywhere - again, I just checked while drafting this message, and Down-Left is not configured anywhere, including in the Trash) executed Home for some reason. Additionally, the attached screen recording does not show this problem, but sometimes Down also executes Home, not End, as expected. Not sure how to reproduce this but it happened just before I recorded the screen, so I was hoping to include that behaviour in the recording but unfortunately I couldn't.

Edit: I just realized that Down executing Home instead of End may after all be related to the unexpected behaviour of Down Left executing Home - Down is a component of Down Left, and perhaps that Down is somehow taken to execute Home, except that in the particular instance when I was recording the screen, Down by itself did not execute Home. I got this insight when I drew Up-Left and Up-Right gestures (neither of which is configured anywhere, and which executed Forward and Back, respectively, which gave me the inference that BTT may sometimes be recognizing only certain parts of multi-directional gestures while discarding the rest?)

Also, again, I am not sure how to reproduce this, but under certain conditions, the mouse gesture drawing recognition begins when mouse right button goes down and up. I.e. Just click on mouse right button, release it, and move the cursor and the drawing stroke begins even though I don't think it should. If I remember correctly, clicking left or right mouse button after drawing an appropriate gesture in this manner executes the correspondingly configured action too. I do need to figure out how to condition mouse gesture drawing to be initiated only within the viewport of Safari, because this issue happens most when I right click on the Safari toolbar or sidebar. I am working on figuring out how to do that (which I believe I should do by using the UI Element Viewer through Advanced Conditions in Trigger Condition section), but this behaviour sometimes happens entirely within the Safari viewport too - right click anywhere on the web page, and the web page context menu pops up, but BTT mouse drawing gesture recognition begins even though I already let go of the right mouse button.

(By the way, as an aside, why didn't you include conditions like "Tigger while mouse NOT hovers anything in window's titlebar" or "Trigger while mouse NOT hovers draggable part of window's titlebar"? You already have some negative conditions for the dock or menubar condition and the notch condition. These negative conditions would've been nice proxies for what I am trying to achieve, for less technically adept users like me.)

Can you please let me know if there is anything I can do on my end, or look into implementing fixes? Thank you.

sounds like something might be corrupted in your BTT database, possibly check whether the gestures are listed in BTTs „recently used“ section. Maybe this is from earlier experiments. I‘d recommended to create a new preset and disable the old one for testing.

You can absolutely configure negative conditions, to do that you need to change the condition modifier at the top left of the conditions window:

Thank you for the response.

I now realize that the trigger conditions in the dropdown menu are a subset of what is available in Advanced Conditions menu.

However, even when I configured the trigger with condition: window_titlebar_hovered = 0, drawing gesture still executes from the Safari titlebar - in fact it executes everywhere (window_titlebar_hovered !=1 does not work either). Please see attached recording.

Maybe I did it wrong, but given all the issues I am running into, I think it might be worth it to do a fresh reinstall of BTT.

Is there a way to remove the app filter for the items, so I can export all my items in one go? I see that selecting "All Configured Triggers Overview" from the trigger type filter dropdown gives me different types of triggers for a given app, but my triggers are still broken into those applicable to different apps/"for all apps" meaning that I would have to do the exporting process at least once for each app + the "all apps" category.

Also, if you can please give me anything else I should know about clean-reinstalling BTT, it would be wonderful.

Thank you.

I wouldn't try to clean install BTT for now. I just did a thorough look through the code based on your observations and I think I can explain at least some, maybe even all of them.

Identical thumbnails / "won't update"
When you re-record a drawing for an existing trigger, BTT doesn't replace the drawing - it adds the new stroke as another variation, and the thumbnail always shows the very first variation. So the first stroke you ever recorded for "Right" (possibly from the May attempts when nothing worked yet) is still in there, still used for recognition, and still what the thumbnail shows. Currently there is no way to delete a single variation. That also explains the cross-talk you saw (Up-Right → Back etc.): if a stray stroke ended up in a gesture's variation list it will keep matching.

Additionally, drawings were looked up by name internally, so two triggers with the same drawing name could end up sharing one drawing.

So the cleanest fix on your side: delete the current drawing triggers, then create them again with new names (e.g. "swipe-left" instead of "Left"), recording each direction once. And please set "Required recognition certainty" back to the default - at 0.2 basically any stroke matches the closest template, which is why Down-Left triggered something. Also make sure "direction should not matter" is unchecked for Up/Down and Left/Right, otherwise they are interchangeable by design. For Down-Right, check that the "only while FN is pressed" option from your first screenshot is really off on that trigger - a leftover modifier requirement silently disables the drawing.

Please use version v6.760 as I improved some of the legacy handling. You can also get it via auto update now.

https://folivora.ai/releases/btt6.760-2026082704.zip