Three-Finger touchpad click as middle-click (Chrome new tab, etc.)

[jozin]

I bought my shiny slim Envy 13 (2017/2018) notebook recently but somehow felt discomfort navigating Chrome without a physical button mapped as mouse middle click to open a link in a new tab. Luckily, the Windows 10 touchpad is recognizing a wide variety of gestures, but the Synaptics driver dialog only allows you to enable/disable the so called "Three-Finger Tap". Help tells you right away that this is only for opening the Cortana Search. What a shame. (Of course I have completely disabled the voice assistant in the first place.)

I have disabled several gestures I clearly won't use, left some that I'll probably won't use, but still wasn't able to configure the most important trio - I want to:

• Double click to Click.
• Two-finger "tap" for a right mouse button click - no problem to configure as seen above.
• Three-finger "tap" for a middle mouse button click - no options for that in Synaptics ClickPad settings.

Weirdly, you can still configure this in the Registry:

1. Push Win+R, type "regedit", enter.
2. Head to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Synaptics\SynTP\TouchPadSMB2cTM3384-1 <= this last key can be different on your system.
3. Change 3FingerTapAction to 4 - this associates the mouse middle button click action
4. Change 3FingerTapPlugInActionID to 11 - this stops opening Cortana at the same time
5. Restart the computer

I don't quite understand the mechanics. If I only change the first value, the middle click gesture works most of the time in Chrome, but occassionally the Cortana Search pops up along, which is very annoying. The Plugins that those codes refer to are defined here:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPPlugIns\SynTP
Each numbered action has a key in there, so if your "3FingerTapPlugInActionID" is set to the default dword:00000061 (decimal 97), it executes the "plugin" in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPPlugIns\SynTP\97 which is Launch Cortana. Note that 0 opens the Start menu, while 11 is the No Action.

This way, I'm quite happy with the touchpad and don't use the physical click of the bottom part at all. Obviously, it is Synaptics' weird design choice or bug, I see other notebook manufacturers suffer from the same behavior. Hope this helps!

[MFI70]

Thank you so much, Jozin. I could use your solution and solved how to open links in a new tab with just one action.