I apologize in advance for such a long vertical post.
g’lxr wrote “Microsoft should just make such user interface features more configurable.”:
Actually, that’s exactly what Intellipoint does. Not only can I change what the middle button does… I can change the left and right buttons as well.
The catch is that I’m not sure if it checks what hardware you have or not.
Here’s the list of actions Intellipoint allows me to assign to the middle button:
Right-click
Next Window
Back
Forward (browser)
Autoscroll
Middle-click
Disabled
Alt
Close
Copy (Ctrl+C)
Ctrl
Cut (Ctrl+X)
Delete
Digital Ink (On/Off)
Double-Click
Enter
Exit Program
Gaming Toggle
Instant Viewer (default)
Macro Editor…
Macro…
Magnify
Maximize
Minimize
New
Open
Paste (Ctrl+V)
Quick Turn
Redo
Shift
Show/Hide Desktop
Undo (Ctrl+Z)
Zoom In
Zoom Out
Keystroke…
Precision Booster…
Start… (custom)
The lists for the left and right button also include a “Click” option, which is the default for the left button. The right button has the default Right-click.
Why can’t you just install the driver that came with the mouse? Most decent meeses include customization of the buttons, especially MS and Logitech products. Regardless, I don’t use the middle button - I find it difficult to use anyway…
More buttons are good in games too, I used my fourth button in Counter Strike as my talk button (k is the default). Also, clicking with the middle button on a link in Opera opens it in a new background tab, wich is better behavior I think.
Whereas creating a standard for middle-click would be nice, it won’t solve the more fundamental problem: the severe overloading of the left click with different conflicting meanings. What we really need to do is go back to Jef Raskin’s suggestion: Left is Activate, Side (is there a standard name for this button?) is Grab, and Right is Select. Middle would be reserved for navigation, that is, panning and zooming. Yes, scrolling would be gone, but scrolling would have become more and more useless as interfaces become more ZUI-like (let’s hope). Instead, one would pan, just like with autoscroll today – but only quasimodally. Yeah, I totally despise the modal autoscroll as well.
The issue of context menus was brought up. What I think needs to be remembered is that context menus hide information. You never know if there’s some useful piece of functionality hiding behind a right-click. And they end up serving as a cop-out way of adding functionality without proper design. Finally, having to search for functionality in context menus also, on top of menus and toolbars, is too much. Thus, it would be better if they were truly contextual, without the need to bring them up manually. We’ve already seen this on the Web, where useful items pop up contextually without right-clicking. This forces application designers to design these contextual objects to appear only when needed, such as when focusing, hovering over, or selecting certain objects. The items that do not belong in those contextual objects would be added directly into the application, forcing good design.
Let me just point out, reluctantly, that right-click for context menus and right-click for Select are still not mutually exclusive. So, even if my suggestion to eliminate standard context menus were ignored, moving Select to right-click would still be feasible. More importantly, it would unburden left-click, and would remove the need for double-click. No more double dysclicksia!
First: the mouse-inventor is called Engelbart – you misspelled his name twice!
Second, I love the paste active selection behaviour of the middle mouse button, but I don’t think using the middle mouse buttons to close tabs is so great. It’s pretty unintuitive and somewhat dangerous (closing a tab with a document you intended to read is at least annoying and AFAIK it cannot be undone) and the alternative, clicking the close button of the tab, is not much harder.
My middle mouse button is set to activate expose for application windows on mac. I find it very useful. This also prevents any weird tab-link behaviour in FF.
middle click pasting in X is a wonderful time saver. The multiple clipboards not so much. Write now for example, middle clicking and ctrl-V give me two different pieces of text. That’s more than I want to keep track of.
The person that figured out we could have a middle mouse button and a scroll wheel is a hero. Getting an ergonomic trackball without sacrificing comfort or function anywhere else on the mouse is worth a Nobel Prize to me - even though Dia is the only program I use that would benefit from it right away.
You have phalanges, why not 5 buttons? I have been trying to find one for a long time.
Of course, you could get one of those cool 8 dimensional control devices with lean, push, pull, twist axis and 27 buttons on them.
But all I want is a mouse that won’t give me carpal tunnel and ulnar tunnel nerve damage. I have been mousing for close to 25 years now and it is taking it’s toll at the end of a busy programming day.
Back in the late '80’s, my very first mouse had 3 buttons. I was running DESQview (text mode multitasking/windowing system, “almost an OS”) under DOS, and the middle mouse button was reserved for calling up the system menu (so that you could switch apps, open apps, etc. Basically the equiv. of the XP “start” button).
Since then I’ve been in Unix and had the 3rd button be used for paste, but never really adapted. The 3rd button should be reserved for OS/System level things!
Also, can I just say as a lefty, that I’m glad that the Mac UI designer DIDN’T decide to put the second mouse button on the side.
I’d have to r-click with my pinky finger.
I wasted about $30 buying from an online-vendor a wireless mouse and keyboard, only to discover that the mouse was one of those contured jobs with the groves for a righty (I will not use a mouse in my right hand - It just sucks.)
Why not let the user choose his own definitions of what the buttons should do. That is, custom mappings. I’ve seen software do this in the past and it would be great for power users.
Paste. The middle button is for paste. None of the alternatives are as compelling as what the X Consortium set down a quarter century ago and without a more compelling reason to change one shouldn’t violate a long-standing cultural convention.
X is by no means perfect and I wouldn’t suggest doing something stupid since it’s always been done that way. However, for reasons others have noted (e.g. the popularity of the operation), middle button paste has been an accepted convention in one of the top three GUIs. Frankly, I don’t care what Redmond or Cupertino does with the middle mouse button as long as a) it’s supported across their entire UI, and b) the user is given the option of setting the behavior to X behavior. I don’t hold much hope for that since Microsoft tends to define “dark” as the standard rather than changing lightbulbs (er, fixing code, playing well with others, etc.), and Apple tends to be different simply because they can. Commercial entities have to believe their own hype, I guess.
Note to developers: Respect cultural conventions (not just your own) and give the user control. And please, please, please think these sorts of changes through before implementing them. It’s likely you’re not as smart as you think you are.
Actually, the idea of a trackball on top of a mouse is much older than that. Two patents for that were filed in the eighties, as I discovered when I tried to patent it myself around 1989.
The middle mouse button is used to repeat commands on buttons and menus. For example, MMB on the File menu, and it fires the last command that you clicked in that menu.
Like tear-off menus, it’s a speedup for more advanced users without the necessity for the user to customize the UI temporarily.
No need for buttons on toolbar for every command imaginable, just MMB to repeat the last command in that menu. It adapts to what’s a ‘frequent command’ for a user.
some 2D graphic apps use MMB to pan the view, so you can manipulate with the LMB and pan around with MMB.
Absolutely no GUI user needs ‘paste’ to be bound to a button permanently, unix fanboys.
For some odd reason, Windows XP doesn’t have an option to assign an action to the middle mouse button… unless you have Microsoft Intellipoint installed.
The bad thing about Intellipoint is that, over time, it has changed the default for the middle mouse button. Up until version 3.x or 4.x, it was autoscroll. Either 4.x or 5.x changed it to Next Window. 6.x changed it to Instant Viewer, which presents a preview of all your open windows… probably a cheap copy of Apple’s Expose.
@Bill: Microsoft didn’t come up with the right-click context menu.
The first Windows application I recall doing it was Quattro Pro from Borland. The next release of Excel promptly included the same functionality (it also borrowed tabbed worksheets from Quattro Pro).
This is another reason why I don’t use Macs. Their mouse is very uninviting. I like mouses with complexity, give me more options!
Middle button rules! It’s had a place since as far back as I can remember… so that’s, what 12 years?
I dislike the Window’s auto-scroll too, but in Linux this problem is null. That said, straight out of the box I find the middle button more functional and important in Linux than in Windows.
Something else I’ve done, as with most folks that know better, is to remove the double clicking of the mouse- let’s face it, it’s annoying. Single clicking in my experience costs less.
