Use Your Gaming Mouse and Browse the Web Like a King
I’ve been using a Mac for ten years now, but I’ve always hated Apple’s standard one-button mouse and never liked trackpad gestures. I grew up with a three-button mouse on the family Amiga. Over the years, I fell in love with scroll wheels, trackballs, and thumb buttons, but I wanted more.
I have been using a 12-button gaming mouse for the past six years. Not for games or fancy 3D applications, but for me to be able to surf the web.
The default keyboard shortcuts for web browsing are anti-ergonomic. I spend most of my day in Chrome using shortcuts like ctrl-shift-tab and option-command-left, the Twister board game that makes my left thumb hurt. I tried customizable keyboard shortcuts with the help of keyboard shortcuts, but each key combination still feels like a Rube Goldberg machine in comparison with the instant gratification of a button mouse.
This works outside of the browser. Whether you are spending your day in Word, Photoshop, PowerPoint, or Excel, you have a set of features that you use all the time, features that deserve a separate button. Follow me to the future of work.
Choose your mouse
Purchase a mouse that suits your comfort level. If you’re used to a simple two-button mouse, you can start by adding two thumb buttons. If you’re already good with gestures, you’re ready for more. Here are the best options at each level.
Novice mice
Many mice now have two extra buttons above the thumb to navigate back and forth through history. Even VicTsing MM057 , Amazon’s top-selling $ 10 mouse, has a pair. It’s a good start, but it’s just the beginning of the mouse’s potential. Plus, on many of these budget mice, the thin and flimsy thumb buttons are easy to accidentally press.
Intermediate mice
Gamers are usually offered mice with more than two additional buttons. So they cost more, include complex sensitivity settings that you won’t be using, and they tend to look like tribal tattooed Decepticons. If you can put up with all of this, for $ 40-70 you get a reliable mouse that will save your aching fingers for years to come.
When positioned optimally, additional buttons are distributed between different fingers, so no finger should “memorize” more than a couple of movements. Logitech dominates this area with a few reasonably priced gaming mice.
My favorite is the Logitech G700s ($ 68), which adds eight additional buttons: four above the thumb, three below the index finger, and two behind the scroll wheel. Most of the buttons are highly contoured, allowing you to toggle between a couple of additional functions. One of the center buttons is mechanically designed to toggle scroll modes, but the other, while hard to reach for the middle finger, can still perform any less-used function. Oblique scrolling is logged on the Mac as a button press that requires a third-party driver to fix.
The G700s are a great choice for small hands. It requires a USB receiver for wireless connectivity, but it still outperforms any Bluetooth mouse I can find.
The Logitech G602 ($ 40) also offers eight “extra” buttons, including six thumb buttons and two extra index finger buttons. Controlling the six thumb buttons can be a little confusing, but it’s intuitive if all of your custom functions are paired up. Like the G700s, it uses a USB receiver wirelessly.
The Logitech MX Master ($ 62) is a great overall mouse, and it comes with a robust driver full of reassignable button functions for multiple applications. It has five extra buttons and a thumb scroll. (The main scroll wheel does not tilt.) The versatile “gesture button” is combined with mouse gestures, which seems a little daunting. It fits in large hands and works wirelessly via Bluetooth without a receiver.
Crazy Mice
UtechSmart Venus and Redragon M901 Perdition have a 4×3 grid of thumb buttons. For now, you’re just creating a second keyboard that can’t be hunted and pecked at.
The Elecom Dux has 16 extra buttons and looks like a Battlestar Galactica . The buttons are bulky and some are hard to reach. It doesn’t work on Mac even with third party mouse drivers and the manual is in Japanese. But on a PC, once you install the Elecom driver, you can practically print with it.
Assign your buttons
The function of your buttons will depend on your workflow. If you, like me, live in your browser, your biggest needs are history and tab navigation. If you are working with photos or videos, you can assign buttons to zoom functions.
Even functions with one-key keyboard shortcuts are sometimes more convenient than mouse buttons. For example, while Photoshop, Premiere, and Final Cut include keyboard shortcuts for switching tools, switching with the mouse might be more intuitive.
Here’s my setup on a Logitech G700s:
- Front thumb buttons (G7 and G5): Browser history forward and backward
- Rear thumb buttons (G6 and G4): Show the desktop and all windows
- Front index finger buttons (G10 and G9): Toggle tabs back and forth
- Back index finger button (G8): open a new tab
- Middle finger button down (G11): reopen last closed tab
Select your mouse driver
Mouse drivers still exist and they are great. On a PC, if the mouse buttons cannot be completely reprogrammed out of the box, there is a driver on the manufacturer’s website.
Most gaming mice do not have a driver for Mac, so you will need to buy a third party driver.
SteerMouse ($ 20) lets you assign all kinds of functions to your buttons, including keystrokes, app switching, music controls, Siri, and Spotlight. on the “chords” of two buttons pressed simultaneously, exponentially increasing the number of assignable functions. It takes a lot to get the mouse to work, but it’s worth it.
If that’s too much, use BetterTouchTool ($ 5), a powerful app that can also assign new functions to keyboard shortcuts, trackpad gestures, Magic Mouse gestures, and Siri gestures and remote buttons. BetterTouchTool cannot assign scrolling functions, so it cannot fix the G700 scrolling tilt problem.
This whole setup may seem overwhelming, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes intuitive and easy to use.
In my research, I learned that setting up a gaming mouse for non-gaming use is a rare and tedious endeavor, and you will enjoy your office work. This is fine. One day your colleagues will come up to you with broken thumbs and shout: “Save us!” And you look down from your standing table and whisper no.