How to enable 2-finger tap as right-click

Question

The mouse buttons on an old laptop are no longer working, so I have to rely on tapping on the touchpad. I have tapping enabled in the Synaptics touchpad settings. One-finger tapping works fine for left-click. There's no option to enable two-finger tapping for right-click in the settings, so that doesn't work. I thought the option doesn't exist due to a hardware limitation. However, I know the touchpad can distinguish between the two; the system tray icon shows green on the first finger and blue on the second. Two-finger scrolling works fine as well.

I've also tried running a Linux distro from live media where both one- and two-finger tapping work just fine once tapping is enabled.

It seems a matter of just presenting the option to the user in the synatics touchpad settings. How can I enable it?

Solution

I don't know why the Synaptics Driver GUI doesn't show an option but it is able to do what we want. Check the steps below, taken from http://amittoor.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-to-use-two-fingers-tap-as-right.html

However I did not follow step 3 and it works anyway. I have Windows 7 SP1 and Synaptics 7.5

1. Press Win+R keys to open run, type regedit and hit enter to open Registry Editor.
2. Go to "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2". If you don't find "TouchPadPS2" and another entry named "TouchPadSMB2c" exists under SynTP then click on "TouchPadSMB2c". If you don't find "SynTP" key then read note(*) at end of the post.
3. On the right double click on "MultiFingerTapFlags" entry and update its value to 3.
4. On the right double click on "2FingerTapAction" entry and update its value to 2.
5. Press OK and Exit.
6. Log Off and start Windows.

(*) If you don't find any of the above key then you have to manually create it. Right Click on Synaptics click on New Key and Give it name ""SynTP". Now similarly create a key named "TouchPadPS2" under "SynTP". Now under "TouchPadPS2" create new "DWORD (32 bit) Value" with name "2FingerTapAction". Double Click it and Change its Value to 2. Logoff and Start Windows.

Comments

[kenshin9786]

what is wrong with this answer to receive downvotes? D: