Swiping up with three fingers no longer shows all open apps and windows.

One of my favorite gestures was to swipe up with three fingers which showed all open windows and apps and I could switch seamlessly to the other one. Now it hides everything and mission control comes up that does nothing useful for me. I want the old behavior back. It is extremely frustrating when Apple takes away a good useful gesture just because now they want to rearrange everything. I had this problem at the last update but I circumvented it somehow now I am on macOS Catalina 10.15.7 and this is the exact reason why I do not want to upgrade all the time I lose features I love and they never introduce anything people are asking for. Just doing mindless redesigns that change habits for no good reason ... this was a useful feature. It was a signature move on a mac. Why do you take it away from me? I see no good reason. There are so many useful things you could be working on, fixing bugs, asking your community to tell you what to work on and what we need instead of redesigning gestures that work perfectly fine and that people are already used to. But this is what "development" is nowadays for programmers: let's mess with the visuals and the gestures people got used to.



MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 21, 2021 1:46 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 21, 2021 8:14 PM

Apple have not removed that functionality. They aren't messing with you. It still works for me on a MBP 15" 2012 with Catalina 10.15.7.

I second the advice of @Barney-15E; check your trackpad settings.

If those seem to be set correctly, I would advise you to see if the problem still happens in Safe mode (hold the shift key down at startup). It can take much longer to safe boot (10 min) so be patient.


How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support 


Safe mode forces the OS to clear certain caches and logs and do other miscellaneous housekeeping. It's non-destructive to user data so is safe to do. Very often certain weird software behavior is corrected by simply logging in this way as a troubleshooting method. When you're in safe boot, the machine will not be at its best performance, especially with graphics, but that's normal.


Does the problem persist while in Safe mode?

Exit safe mode by restarting your Mac normally and re-evaluate the issue again.

If the problem is still unresolved, please return here and post a reply and we’ll see what else we can come up with for help.


Do you have any sort of anti-virus or system clean-up apps installed? Those often mess with the proper workings of the macOS and are not advised to be installed.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 21, 2021 8:14 PM in response to Andraas

Apple have not removed that functionality. They aren't messing with you. It still works for me on a MBP 15" 2012 with Catalina 10.15.7.

I second the advice of @Barney-15E; check your trackpad settings.

If those seem to be set correctly, I would advise you to see if the problem still happens in Safe mode (hold the shift key down at startup). It can take much longer to safe boot (10 min) so be patient.


How to use safe mode on your Mac - Apple Support 


Safe mode forces the OS to clear certain caches and logs and do other miscellaneous housekeeping. It's non-destructive to user data so is safe to do. Very often certain weird software behavior is corrected by simply logging in this way as a troubleshooting method. When you're in safe boot, the machine will not be at its best performance, especially with graphics, but that's normal.


Does the problem persist while in Safe mode?

Exit safe mode by restarting your Mac normally and re-evaluate the issue again.

If the problem is still unresolved, please return here and post a reply and we’ll see what else we can come up with for help.


Do you have any sort of anti-virus or system clean-up apps installed? Those often mess with the proper workings of the macOS and are not advised to be installed.

This thread has been closed by the system or the community team. You may vote for any posts you find helpful, or search the Community for additional answers.

Swiping up with three fingers no longer shows all open apps and windows.

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