One of my favorite features of Apple’s new trackpads (such as the Macbook Air trackpad or the Magic Trackpad) is the three-finger drag gesture. It makes using a trackpad much more ergonomically sound, because dragging while holding the button down with your thumb puts a lot of strain on your hand and quickly leads to discomfort.

It still can’t make the trackpad comfortable for long work periods that require a lot of mouse interaction, but as I usually spend my day coding with a VIM emulator, I don’t touch the trackpad very often and I find that the gestures are very helpful for common tasks like switching spaces and windows. IntelliJ IDEA 11 even lets you pinch-to-resize the text in you active editor!

Anyway, today I discovered a cool trick with the three finger drag gesture. If you are dragging something around and you lift one of your fingers, the object continues to drag with momentum. What’s even cooler is that if you put your middle and ring fingers down on a draggable item, you can flick the item around the screen with your index finger. It’s kind of awesome!

It makes it easy to select a large block of text, and it will save your butt if you are trying to three-finger drag something all the way across the screen and you don’t quite make it before running out of room on the surface of the trackpad.