I'd like to be able to use continuous trackpad scrolling/movement as a BTT trigger for arbitrary actions, with the action driven by the actual movement delta rather than simply repeating while fingers remain on the trackpad.
My immediate use case is horizontal scrolling in Terminal.app.
less -S supports horizontal movement using Left/Right Arrow. I'd like to configure something like:
- two-finger horizontal scroll left → Left Arrow
- two-finger horizontal scroll right → Right Arrow
BTT's existing “2 Finger Swipe Left/Right” gestures are discrete gestures, so mapping them to arrow keys only sends one arrow press per recognized swipe.
“Repeat assigned action” is closer, but it repeats based on how long the fingers remain touching after the gesture triggers. That means it isn't proportional to the actual trackpad movement, and changing direction without lifting the fingers doesn't naturally change which action is being repeated.
Ideally a continuous/fluid trackpad trigger would expose:
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current horizontal/vertical movement direction
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movement/scroll delta or velocity
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continuous triggering proportional to movement
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direction changes during the same touch sequence
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arbitrary BTT actions for each direction
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normal app-specific conditions/scoping
This seems similar to the older “4 finger scroll” request, but I think the useful primitive is more general: expose continuous trackpad scroll/movement as an action source rather than treating swipes only as discrete recognized gestures.
BTT 6 now has much more sophisticated smooth/fluid scrolling and trackpad-emulation support for other devices, so perhaps some of that infrastructure could also make this possible for native trackpad input.
Related / prior discussions
A few older threads seem directly related to this same underlying need for smooth/continuous gesture-driven actions:
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Volume change repeat with trackpad gestures (2020) — discusses the difference between repeated actions and true fluid gestures driven by trackpad movement.
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4 finger scroll (2024) — asks for movement/distance-based continuous behavior and the ability to reverse direction without lifting your fingers.
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Configuring Continuous Gestures (Volume + Window Switching) like on Windows (2025) — another request for continuous trackpad gestures rather than discrete swipe-triggered actions.
My request is essentially for that underlying continuous/fluid gesture input to be exposed as a general-purpose BTT trigger/action source.
