Modify or disable Windows 8 swipe gestures on touchpad / laptop

Question

I have an ASUS G75VW laptop with a Synaptic touchpad (/trackpad). When I move my finger from one edge towards the middle (the swipe), Windows 8 will bring up different stuff.

This is a problem because the area where I can actually move the mouse with my finger is too small (or, I mostly use the top left of the touchpad). So I often end up doing a swipe and bringing up some menu, or to do the swipe so slow that no menu is appearing but the mouse pointer is also not moving when I move my finger. Quite annoying.

When swiping from left edge it earlier swapped apps like crazy. I disabled that, so now it only brings up the same menu as pressing win+tab (or some times the charms bar, I never know which). I could change that by:

Win+I → Change PC settings → General → When I swipe from the left edge, switch directly to my most recent app.

I've tried Mouse settings in Control Panel, driver settings for my touchpad and searching for swipe and gestures on my computer (which was what led me to the setting above) with no luck.

How can I disable the swipe gestures, or change what they do?

Solution 1

Doing this involves editing the registry, it is recommended to do a manual system restore point before doing this.

You will need to make a file called gestures.reg, open notepad and paste the following:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Right Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Left Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Right Edge Pull Extended Zone]
"ActionType"=dword:00000000
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Top Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000000

Save this file somewhere, with the .reg extension.

Now run it, some warning boxes may come up, you will need to press Yes when they do, after the operation has finished, reboot your PC and they should now be disabled.

---

If you want to re-enable these gestures, then you will need to do the same but use the following text when saving the file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Right Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000002
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Left Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000002
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Right Edge Pull Extended Zone]
"ActionType"=dword:00000002
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig\TouchPadPS2\Top Edge Pull]
"ActionType"=dword:00000002

Solution 2

Daniel B's answer worked great.

However, after experimenting with drivers I found a Synaptics driver from ASUS that comes with something they call ASUS Smart Gesture. There, under the Edge Gesture tab one can disable the different swipe gestures. Easier and safer than messing with the registry.

However this only works for ASUS computers, while Daniel B's answer should work for most Synaptic touchpads.

Solution 3

For my Dell, I went to Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Devices and Printers. Right click on the laptop picture and select Mouse Settings. Click on Dell Touchpad, and in that screen select the link that says "Click to change DellTouchpad settings". Go to Gestures.

Swipe options are listed on this screen.

Solution 4

I have an HP that also has a Synaptics TouchPad and I just searched (in the main Windows 8 search thing) "touchpad" and it brought up a few different results under "Settings", one of which was the Synaptics TouchPad that I have, so I clicked on it and it opened a window with settings for my touchpad. One of the settings says "Enable Edge Swipes" and I just unchecked it and now it's good.

Solution 5

On my Acer Aspire with windows 8, I right clicked the bottom left corner to reach the control panel. From there I went to mouse options, then to ELAN, and from there to options. This gave me the option to disable edge swiping, which seems to have worked quite well.

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Comments

[Matsemann]

I don't have that option, but thanks anyway. Will probably help others. :)

[Guffa]

Works great. I wanted to change only the right edge gesture, so I just changed the setting in regedit.

[PeteH]

+1. You can imagine that under the hood this just changes the values in the registry to what @DanielB says, but doing it this way is a whole lot easier than using regedit.

[hheimbuerger]

Works great, although the key for me is called TouchPadPS2_1 instead of TouchPadPS2 (there is no TouchPadPS2 key). So it might be worth inspecting or doing manually with regedit if the .reg file doesn't work for you.

[Ben Joyx]

This has recently stopped working for me after updating the synaptics driver to version 17 (win 8.1)

[steenhulthin]

Finally got this working on Fujitsu Celcius H series using TouchPadPS2_3 in stead of TouchPadPS2. (on windows 8.1)

[Joshua Nurczyk]

On my HP laptop this is where you change the setting for the Synaptic pad.

[Brian]

Levnovo ThinkPad added "Turn Off Gestures" in the Control Panel App

[Milk Man]

Very similar on my Lenovo Edge 15: Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Devices and Printers > Mouse > Device Settings (tab) > Settings Button