Discovered a really cool Surface Book pen trick!

[Christopher Lindsay]

Discovered a really cool trick today. Apparently the Surface Book pen (I assume it works with the regular SP as well) is able to detect flicks to the screen as it's own input. By default if you flick the tip of your pen up or down it will drag, e.g. perform a mouse wheel like scroll. Well there is a setting that allows you to customize this so that you can flick your pen different directions and do different combinations of custom actions. To access these settings you have to go to the control panel and do a search for "pen and touch". Then click "set flicks to perform certain task". From here you can turn on multidirectional flicks and asign each direction to your own function. For me, I use Ctrl, Alt and Shift a lot so I set flicks for those controls. Enjoy the tip!

 

[Dush Ku]

interesting, doesn't seem to work in the web browser but does in File Explorer

 

[Danobe]

Works in firefox on my Thinkpad S1 Yoga (with the standard pen).

Edit: You have to hit the screen "running", so to speak. It doesn't work if you place the pen and then move it quickly. It has to be moving when it touches the screen.

 

[Vasrias]

Yeah, I tried it in Edge first, which didn't work and then I tried it in Foxit Reader and it worked. So it either doesn't work on Edge or on all UWP apps. I haven't tried other apps.

 

[Danobe]

You're right. Tried it in Edge, and I can't get it to work. That's a bit of an oversight - especially in Edge where you can draw on pages etc., lending itself to pen-input otherwise.

 

[Lumious]

All I have is edge installed at the moment and cant get it to work

 

[Christopher Lindsay]

For whatever reason the edge main window doesn't seem to reject the flick but it works pretty much anywhere else including the title bar of edge lol. My guess is edge mistakes the flick as an actual pen mark.