How do I select and scroll?

[Good User Name]

I feel like on my older Mac I was able to hold a finger down on the trackpad and then begin scrolling. This caused the select highlight to be applied to all of the text I was passing by with my cursor. The cursor itself wasn't moving, it was the page that was moving.

But now this no longer seems to work. Pressing the trackpad with one finger and attempting to scroll with two others just causes the cursor to move with the two fingers rather than scrolling the page.

Is there a way to get the behavior I want? Does anyone else at least know what I'm talking about here?

I'll try to post a video if anyone needs it.

 

[Good User Name]

I went into System Preferences > Accessibility > Pointer Control > Mouse & Trackpad > Trackpad Options and unchecked "Enable Dragging" [three finger drag].

It seems there's a conflict in there.

Either the trackpad thinks that 3 fingers on the trackpad is for Mission Control/Exposé or it thinks it's for dragging the window (can't enable both). So I set Mission Control/Exposé to 4 fingers and enabled 3 finger dragging in Accessibility. This then conflicts with the 3 finger action that's implied by selecting and scrolling.

A better solution for this might be to limit any 3 finger dragging to just the position over a window's chrome and anywhere else in the window to allow for select scrolling.

EDIT: The weird thing is that it almost seems to start working sometimes with the setup I had prior (3 finger drag enabled) but you really have to work at getting the page/document scrolling. Once that's turned off it works without a hitch.

 

[Toutou]

I have three-finger dragging enabled and clicking and scrolling works for me just fine if I put the clicking finger far enough from the two scrolling ones. If I put them close to each other, macOS understandably gets confused and moves the cursor itself.

 

[Good User Name]

I have three-finger dragging enabled and clicking and scrolling works for me just fine if I put the clicking finger far enough from the two scrolling ones. If I put them close to each other, macOS understandably gets confused and moves the cursor itself.

I tried this as well and it doesn’t work as reliably as just turning off 3 finger drag.

I realize now that I probably never encountered this issue before on my old Mac as I never turned 3 finger drag on.

 

[Gregg2]

Good user name, @ Good User Name!