As a remote worker I often work away from a proper desk and don’t have access to a real mouse. In fact, after over 6 years of working remotely, I don’t even use a mouse when I am work at home. Which is why I love a good trackpad.

The Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 is a wonderful laptop with a great trackpad. However, there were a couple of things I wanted from it that the Synaptics settings couldn’t configure, even though they were supported by the driver. I am writing this post so in the future when I do the inevitable reinstall, I have instructions for getting back into a good state.

Get rid of fake buttons

I am used to working with trackpads that have “real” buttons. Unfortunately, the Yoga turns the bottom quarter of the trackpad into fake touch buttons. The problem with these fake buttons is that I never know which one I am going to press unless I look. After months of working with the Yoga, I was still right-clicking most of the time and it was driving me insane.

Follow the steps below to do away with the buttons and reclaim the full trackpad:

1. Open Regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2
3. Set ExButton4Action to 1 (By default it will be 2)

How to right-click again?

So without the fake buttons there isn’t an obvious way to right-click. In the Synaptics settings you can set up right-click on two finger click, but who has the strength for that? What we really want is right-click on two finger tap.

Follow the steps below to get right-click on two finger tap:

1. In Regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2
3. Set 2FingerTapAction to 2
4. Set 2FingerPressButtonAction to 2 (If you want the right-click on two finger click)

I have 3 fingers; Can I use them for something?

As an ex-mouse user I enjoyed using the middle mouse button to open links in new tabs, wouldn’t it be nice to get a middle-click on 3 finger tap?

Follow the steps below to get middle-click on three finger tap:

1. In Regedit
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2\3FingerGestures
3. Set ActionID0 to 12 hex
4. Set PluginID0 to SynTP
5. Navigate up to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadPS2
6. Set 3FingerTapAction to 4
7. Set 3FingerTapPlugInActionID to 0
8. Clear the value in 3FingerTapPlugInID

Time for a reboot

After making the registry changes you will need to reboot for them to take effect. Beware, I have noticed that if I use the Synaptics settings tool to make further tweaks, some of the registry changes get reverted, so keep these steps handy.