On a MacBook air, the trackpad is super hard to use because whenever I try to move the cursor, it selects everything or drags something to somewhere random. This is the fault of some tap to drag feature. Whenever I touch the trackpad and move my finger, it thinks I am trying to click and drag. I disabled tap to click and everything, but this feature still vexes me. This feature is a pain in the butt so how can I disable it?
How to disable tap to drag
trackpad
Related Solutions
Yep!
You double-tap and lift off to select the word. Then double-tap the selected word and start dragging immediately keeping your finger down. It's actually kind of tricky to get to work without dragging the word but once you get it a couple of times it gets easier.
Here's an explanation on how to do it also from macworld.com, same as above:
To select text (and this works in nearly any program that involves text) on a word-by-word basis, do a double-click-and-hold before you start dragging, instead of a single click. As you move the mouse along now, you’ll see that entire words are added to your selection as soon as the cursor touches their first character. So if you’ve got a fair bit of text to select, but still need precision, this is a pretty quick way to get it done.
Here are my trackpad settings
As far as I know, there is no way to do this without external tools.
Usb Overdrive lets you do this http://www.usboverdrive.com/ and is what I use.
Steer mouse also has this setting. http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/
Mouse Curves http://triq.net/articles/mouse-acceleration-preference-pane-mac-os-x Has the advantage of being free, but Apple removing the acceleration API in 10.6 may have ramifications on its utility.
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Best Answer
If this is a newer MacBook Air (with a Force Touch trackpad), changing the pressure required to "Click" should help fix this. I experienced similar issues on my MacBook Pro.
Go into System Preferences, click the Trackpad icon, and select the "Point & Click" tab. On the left you should see a "Click" slider with "Light", "Medium", and "Firm" options. If you shift it over one setting, you might find that's enough to fix the issue.
Alternatively, disabling Force Click and haptic feedback (unchecking the checkbox at the bottom), may also stop peculiar behavior from happening. That's ultimately what I ended up doing and it made a world of difference in my case.