I'm gonna be publicly ridiculed for this one and I'm good with that.

I've been trying to get the show desktop gesture on my mac right for years. You know, the one that "windows-D" was doing so loyaly for ages.

My habit is to arbitrarily swipe as many fingers as I can find available from center of trackpad outwards. It used to take me ~10 trials to get it right.

And now, enlightened by this random thread, I suddenly figured out I actually need to swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downwards simultaneously. This is the greatest Epiphany HN had given me since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13651148

I had no idea what you meant with "swipe 3 fingers upwards and one downward", but the image and description at https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204895 made it much more clear.

OTOH, more than one mouse button would be "confusing".

I have a 90% success rate with my totally different approach-

put four fingers in the center of the trackpad- not touching each other, but very close. then naturally spread them apart.

F11 does it

I know but though I have pretty big hands I can't do fn + F11 with one hand, so it's a no-go.

All the non-discoverability of vim, without the power!

> Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement.

How is that an improvement? I get that the shaking gesture is horrible, but this one is not better: a three finger swipe is unusual, impossible to discover, hard to do. I don’t get why swiping left, usually associated with going to the right (= forward in Western cultures), is here used to undo (= going backward).

yeah, I absolutely loath these gestures with a passion. Impossible to get right when you need them, and impossible to avoid doing by accident when you don't

Don't forget that three finger swipe right does... "redo"!