Tapestry turns trackpad gestures into actions, without BetterTouchTool. Tap five fingers to press Return, hold three to keep Option down for push-to-talk, or swipe four fingers up-right to run a Shortcut.
Gestures
Each gesture is a finger count and a motion:
- Fingers: three, four, or five.
- Tap: rest the fingers without moving, then lift within 0.6 seconds. Quicker touches than the tap press time (Settings, 200 ms by default) are ignored, so drags and swipes don't trigger taps.
- Hold: rest the fingers for a moment. A key stays down until you lift.
- Swipe: up, down, left, right, or diagonal, within a second. Make it deliberate: travel about a third of the trackpad's height. Straight swipes must stay within 20° of their direction, diagonals within 12° of a true diagonal, like corner to corner. Movements in between are left to macOS.
To set a gesture by doing it, open its card, click Record Gesture, then tap, hold, or swipe on the trackpad. Tapestry fills in the fingers and motion, or says why the gesture didn't count. Gestures don't run their actions while recording.
Actions
- Key: any key or shortcut, like Return, ⌘↩, or Option on its own. Click the key field and press it.
- Shortcut: runs one of your Shortcuts.app shortcuts by name.
- Open: opens an app or a link.
Setup
- Build and open Tapestry (see below). The woven glyph appears in the menu bar, and the gestures window opens.
- Grant Accessibility when macOS asks. Tapestry needs it to press keys. If you missed the prompt, use Allow in the menu bar popover.
- Tapestry only listens to the trackpad. It can't stop macOS from also acting on the same gesture. If a three-finger tap also looks things up, turn off Look up & data detectors in System Settings > Trackpad. If your swipes also switch Spaces, move those system gestures to a finger count you don't use here.
Open Tapestry at login is in Settings.
How it works
Tapestry reads raw touches from Apple's private MultitouchSupport framework, the same one BetterTouchTool uses. For each touch it tracks the most fingers down, how long they stayed, and how far their center moved. When that matches a gesture, it posts key events with CGEvent, runs shortcuts run, or opens the app or link with NSWorkspace. Tapestry has no network access and no analytics. It stores only your gestures.
Because the framework is private, a future macOS update could break it.
Install
Download Tapestry.dmg from the latest release, open it, and drag Tapestry to Applications. It is signed and notarized.
Build
Requirements: macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and the Xcode Command Line Tools. You don't need Xcode.
./build.sh
open build/Tapestry.app
macOS ties the Accessibility permission to the app's signature. build.sh signs with a code signing certificate named "Tapestry Local Signing" if your keychain has one, so the permission survives rebuilds. Without it the build is ad-hoc signed, and after each rebuild you need to remove Tapestry from System Settings > Privacy & Security > Accessibility and add it again.
To redraw the icon: swift scripts/render-icon.swift. To redraw the README banner: scripts/render-banner.sh (needs Google Chrome).
License
MIT
