Right-click not working on trackpad

Hey Cliff,

Glad you worked it out! Sorry I wasn't much of a help though. But it's very friendly of you to pretend my noob-talk wasn't totally useless 😀

Best wishes,

Lara

If anyone is still hung up on this.. Provided your trackpad is not mechanicaly bad.

Go to trackpad under system preferences and look under "secondary click" and you will see a little drop down menu. There you can select the option you want, two finger tap, or actial click on bottom right of trackpad etc.

I had the same problem, but I was able to fix it

Go to System Prefrences > trackpad and check if you have checked both one finger secondary click and two finger secondary click. If that is the case uncheck the Two finger secondary click. Here you go the secondary bottom right/left click will work all fine.

All the best... Hope that answers your question...

Very helpful splizaat.

I was having this problem on my iMac, and I got to the point I figured it was some sort of conflict.

Running Lion, it was under System Preferences — Mission Control. The secondary drop-down bar for Mission Control activation was set to "Secondary Mouse Button", which was why I couldn't get the right-click on my mouse or trackpad to work.

Thanks for the tip.

I faced the same issue with latest(2012) mac book pro 13" (released in June) and could fix the issue using below solution

System Preferences — Mission Control. The secondary drop-down bar for Mission Control activation was set to "Secondary Mouse Button", which was why I couldn't get the right-click on my mouse or trackpad to work.

Had the same issue and it was driving me crazy. Enabling/Disabling Secondary Tap under the Two Fingers section in trackpad preferences had no effect. First clue was in this thread earlier when I saw somone saying tapping wasn't working but actually pressing down hard gave the desired result. Voila, same w/ me. So, I went back to preferences and I noticed that, somehow, under the One Finger section the Tap to Click box was unchecked. No clue how that happened as I use this hundreds of times daily, at least, and immediatly noticed when it broke/changed. Checked that box and all is well.

Right-click stopped working. Called Apple Care. After several procedures, this one worked:

Shut down trackpad

Shut-down computer

Unplug comuputer for 30 seconds.

Start computer

Log in

Start trackpad

Open trackpad preferences

Uncheck secondary click

Check secondary click

Explanation: blue tooth munged

After reading all the above, especially the bluetooth munged bit from Apple care via @downeyt

I turned off bluetooth for a few seconds (turned it back on with digitizing pad as even the keyboard is bluetooth!)

That did the trick!!

This still has not helped me, my secondary button is checked the tap to click is checked, theres no drop down menu for me, idk if that is because this thread is old and im up to the newest version of mac, but my secondary click dosent work, i know that i can use the old way by holding control, but i want it the way it was lol. i have a 2008 (old mac) macbook pro 17 inch, any advice anyone can give me would be of great help!

i did a clean install of ml on my mbp 2009 and after this, i couldn't get the two-finger-rightclick to work. turned out, like runninonmt, i had 1-finger-tap disabled (looks like i depress the touchpad for left-click and make a twofinger-tap for right :-) . because of this the 2-finger-rightclick-tap didn't work, no matter if the box was checked or not. i activated the 1-finger-tap. bingo.

Thanks @datura-takara, that was a lot easier than the apple care procedure. I turned off bluetooth and turned it on again. Now the right-click is working again.

So, no two-finger tap for secondary clip in Finder when I try in a list. Snow Leopard 10.6.8, Late '08 Macbook (not pro). But when I try the two finger tap in my Browser, it's just fine. When I two finger tap in the Finder pane that gives the info for the highlighted file (in Column view), it works just fine. If I control-click on the highlited filename, no result. But if I go up and click in Actions, the functions are there and work properly. Software Update shows that I'm current (maybe this is the problem?).

So, for example, if I try to two finger tap for secondary click on the highlighted "Chord Paper.pdf", nothing happens. It's the same when I use a control-(single) click - nothing happens. But if I two finger tap to secondary click under the "More info..." button, I get full functionality. Here in my browser window, it works just fine. I am running really low on hard drive space while this is happening, 1.7GB left. But I've been down that low before and nothing like this has happened.

I'm encountering the same issue as Tiktoc.

I first tried to reset the Finder preferences: with deleting the .plist files (in ~/Library/Preferences) for both Finder and the finder sidebar, and then force quitting Finder. This fix Finder for a short moment, but the problem reapears quickly.

The secondary tap is working well with any other application.

If anyone would have a suggestion, I'll be most obliged.

Thanks.

Yep, same as Tik and Pike. I'll continue searching for a solution.

Me too. MacBook Pro. 10.6.8, suddendly the 2 finger secondary tap stopped working in the finder. I've tried just restarting the finder, it's painless and quick but it only works until I navigate away from the finder. Once I come back it's gone.