Bye Bye Back Button and So Much More

If you happen to be fortunate enough to be using a MacBook Air or a Penryn-based MacBook Pro with a multi-touch trackpad, then you can get a lot of use out of Multiclutch, a preference pane app that will let you customize-the-crap out of your multi-touch trackpad. I am one of those weirdos who always uses his MBP built-in keyboard and trackpad - even when sitting at his desk. I hate using an external keyboard and regular mouse. Anyway, from the horse's mouth:

Basically, MultiClutch allows you to assign custom keyboard shortcuts in a given app to a given gesture. Want swipes to change tabs in Safari? Done. The same in iChat? Done. Want zoom-in to open emails in Mail, zoom-out to close windows in every app, and a swipe down to bring up Quicksilver? Done done done.

I love how Safari defaults to the swipe (three fingers) left as the "back" command and the swipe right as the "forward" command. Unfortunately, Firefox doesn't get the same treatment by default, so Multiclutch definitely saved the day for me there. I virtually never use my back and forward buttons anymore. I'm half-tempted to remove them from my browsers altogether (but not whole-tempted).

With Multiclutch, you can make gestures either for specific applications or globally (across all applications) In addition to making the left and right swipe the back and forward buttons in Firefox, I added global commands for exposé. I made swipe-up the command to exposé all windows, and swipe-down the command to show the desktop. I cannot tell you how much time and effort this saves! Also, I made the pinch gestures zoom in and out in Firefox 3 - a very nice addition. Check the screen-grabs below.