Lag and unresponsiveness with trackpad

Bugs or Unexpected Behavior
1

Describe the bug
For the past few days I’ve been experiencing some weird Trackpad gesture lags and unresponsiveness. It would work fine for a while but suddenly after some gestures (in particular involving 4 fingers - 4 finger tap or force click, etc. but not just) the trackpad would stop responding intermittently (no haptic feedback, no reaction). Once this starts to happen, the lag and unresponsiveness would even happen with single click or two finger clicks, etc. The whole system starts to slow down more and more and lags a lot. Sometimes actions will be triggered several seconds after the gesture, and in trackpad Live View I can clearly see that the touches are not recognised or lag very much behind.

I have tried restarting the app and re-installing it, but once this happens every time I relaunch the app it would beachball half a minute, and the issues still persist. I tried looking at Activity Monitor but couldn't see any unsual high CPU or Memory usage. I have to restart the whole computer for it to go away (for a while).

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

Magic Trackpad (USB-C), both bluetooth and wired connection

Device information:

  • Type of Mac: Mac Studio M4 Max
  • macOS version: Sequoia 15.7.5
  • BetterTouchTool version: btt6.306-2026032508, btt6.339-2026040211, btt6.341-2026040302…
2

usually if such things happen, it’s multiple mouse/keyboard/accessibility apps are running at the same time causing some weird conflicts.

Another thing that has caused similar issues in the past is the experimental Dropbox / iCloud sync in BTT. If you have that enabled, try to disable it and best restart BTT or even macOS afterwards

3

The syncing option is always off, and I don’t have any new apps added recently. I cannot think of any mouse/keyboard apps that might conflict with BTT. Is it possible to find out what goes wrong?

4

unfortunately it’s really hard, the best option would be to quit app after app (except for BTT) to see whether it behaves normally after quitting any app.

If it is really happening after triggering a specific gesture - it might be worth looking at the actions that are triggered

5

Too bad… I’m gonna try if I can find out any pattern. Thank you anyway.

6

After some experimentations, I suspect the issue is caused by four finger gestures (four finger double tap, four finger force click)… These gestures seem to cause some kind of delayed action and jam up subsequent actions.

I use four finger double tap to execute ⌘+W in Safari, and four finger force click to move current window across displays. These actions worked fine before but seem to be getting more buggy recently.