Haptiker

How to control volume and brightness with your Mac trackpad

Your hand is already on the trackpad, so reaching for the function keys to change the volume or dim the screen breaks your flow. Here are three ways to do it from the trackpad, from built-in to fully automatic.

Quick answer

macOS has no built-in trackpad gesture for volume or brightness. You can click the sliders in Control Center, set up your own gestures in a tool like BetterTouchTool, or install an edge-slider app such as Haptiker, which turns the right edge of the trackpad into a volume slider and the left edge into a brightness slider.

1. Control Center (built in)

  1. Click the Control Center icon in the menu bar, next to the clock.
  2. Drag the Display slider for brightness or the Sound slider for volume.
Control Center opens from the menu bar, next to the clock. Display and Sound are the two sliders.

To save a click, you can show Sound and Display directly in the menu bar. On recent macOS versions, open System Settings › Control Center and set Sound to always show in the menu bar. It costs nothing, but it still needs a pointer trip to the top of the screen and a precise drag.

Keyboard shortcuts, for comparison

On a Mac keyboard, F1 and F2 change brightness and F10 to F12 mute and change the volume. Hold Option and Shift while pressing a volume or brightness key to change it in smaller steps.

F1F2…F10F11F12
F1 and F2 for brightness, F10 to F12 for mute and volume.

2. BetterTouchTool gestures

BetterTouchTool lets you assign almost any trackpad gesture to an action, including volume and brightness. Community tutorials often use a two-finger rotate gesture for volume. It is very flexible, but you design and tune the gestures yourself. See Haptiker vs BetterTouchTool for when each fits.

3. Trackpad edge sliders with Haptiker

Haptiker is a menu bar app that turns the edges of the trackpad into sliders, with no setup beyond one permission:

  1. Download Haptiker, drag it to Applications and open it.
  2. Allow Accessibility access when macOS asks, so it can read trackpad touches.
  3. Slide one finger up or down the right edge to change the volume.
  4. Slide along the left edge to change the brightness of the screen your cursor is on.
  5. Slide sideways along the top edge to change the keyboard backlight.
BRIGHTNESSVOLUMEKEYBOARD LIGHT
Right edge for volume, left edge for brightness, top edge for the keyboard backlight.

An on-screen level shows the new value, and the trackpad ticks as it changes. Double-tap the right edge to mute. A slide only counts when one finger starts on the edge and runs along it, so two-finger scrolls and normal pointing keep working as before.

Haptiker works on macOS 12 or later with a built-in Force Touch trackpad or a Magic Trackpad, on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. External monitor brightness needs an Apple Silicon Mac.

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