I think the obvious choice is for the middle-button to cause an instant restart of windows.
Or it could send the windows equivalent of ‘kill -9’ to the process/thread of whatever window you’re clicking on. Sort of a shortcut to end-task button in the task-manager (but with higher priority).
It does whatever you want it to do…
Reconfigure it.
For what it is worth…
The original mouse (late 1960s) was used with a “NLS” terminal. In addition to the standard keypad there was a piano like keypad with five un-marked keys.
The idea was that with five keys on the piano keypad and three on the mouse one could type in 8 bits of binary in one motion. Actually people learned just to type a few letters and would type in commands without having to look at the keyboard.
I worked at USC Information Sciences Institute and we had a machine shop where we made our own mice and piano keypads.
technically, the standard mouse has 5 buttons, since the 2 actions of the scroll wheel are considered as 2 distinct buttons.
Either way I love the default of middle click for paste, since it’s a standard method that has saved me a considerable period of time since I first started using the feature, but now I consider it an essential feature of any operating system, wonder if there’s a plugin for firefox that replicates the effect on windows machines?
Install the mouse drivers, then you can disable that annoying autoscroll.
I was recently referred to your site by a friend and have been enjoying reading the archives.
Regarding this article, the only reason I install mouse software is to reprogram the wheel button to paste. For me, it is a standout productivity tool.
The middle-click-to-paste “feature” in X is the most horrible experience I have with Linux, especially when I have a mouse like Intellimouse which has a sensible middle wheel button.
I always accidentally paste random stuff in who-knows-where places in my code while scrolling, and screw it up without even noticing! So damn annoying! What’s worse, it’s a hardcoded behavior and you can’t even choose to turn if off! The only workaround seems to totally disable your middle wheel button. What a horrible horrible decision the xorg folks have made!
I’m surprised there hasn’t been more mention of Zoom. Some apps use the wheel button as:
Hold and drag mouse - pans.
Hold and rotate wheel - zooms in or out.
So you can zoom out, pan a large distance, zoom back in, pan a small distance. It’s a really quick and convenient way to navigate large documents.
middle mouse button = mute wife.
case closed.
Middle-clicking over a link opens it in a new tab
Hey, that’s good to know!
I guess no-one else has used RISC OS then. It was used on Acorn machines, when they were still about (80s-90s). They had three button mice from the start, which were clearly labelled (though not actually on the mouse). From left-to-right:
In a lot of design applications (especially those that work in 3d), the middle mouse is assigned the job of navigation, such as rotating the view and moving around.
This use seems consistent with the scroll application in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Additionally, it combines well both thematically and mechanically with the use of the mouse wheel to zoom and/or scroll.
I just removed the autoscroll mode when clicking the middle button in the mouse properties in the control panel (logitech). Just select changing the action of the button to unassigned. Scrolling with the wheek still works.
throwing grenades in call of duty 5
Install the mouse drivers, then you can disable that annoying autoscroll.
I think you’re right Daniel, I completely disagree with Jeff on the scrolling. I can think of more instances where I’ve intended to use the scroll feature and accidentally opened another tab than vice-versa.
I find the panning ability a very useful feature, especially since it provides combined vertical and horizontal scrolling (which makes it perfect for viewing large images), and the extra speed control it gives you is a godsend in long documents (instead of spinning the scroll wheel half a dozen times).
Additionally, considering that it is actually part of the scroll wheel surely it makes more sense conceptually that it would be linked to this sort of behaviour and another key combo such as R+L mouse buttons combined would open a new tab?
I’ve been using the middle mouse button to open links in new tabs since browsers first started supporting tabs 
But recently I treated myself to a logitech MX Revolution and the behavior of my middle button has changed.
I now use it to switch scroll modes (hyper scrolling and precision) as I feel it is the button best suited to this function as it is directly related to the scroll-wheel.
But not wanting to lose the single click, new tab (without having to hold ctrl) that I was used to 1 of the side buttons nearest my thumb acts as my middle click used to.
But none of this is the default behavior of the mouse itself, it is what I have customized it to do (through the supplied software) and this to me is the perfect solution. Rather than being stuck with what the manufacturer thinks should happen, I can change the button preferences to suit my own needs.
I really like the emerging convention of middle-click to close a tab. It is increasingly becoming supported outside of the web browser world: Recent versions of the Microsoft Visual Studio IDE support middle-clicking a tab to close it, and the open-source Eclipse Java IDE will shortly support this as well:
a href="https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=156792"https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=156792/a
I recently went looking for a utility that would allow me to close applications in the Windows Taskbar. What is the Taskbar, after all, but a tabbed view of all open Windows applications?
I found what I was looking for in a free utility, Taskbar Shuffle, by “Jay E.”. In addition to allowing a middle-click on Taskbar buttons to close the associated application, Taskbar Shuffle also enables (in Windows XP) Taskbar buttons to be dragged around and reordered just like you can do with browser tabs in Firefox and other modern browsers.
I blogged more about this topic back in February, here:
a href="http://blog.jonschneider.com/2008/02/utility-of-day-taskbar-shuffle.html"http://blog.jonschneider.com/2008/02/utility-of-day-taskbar-shuffle.html/a
(Jeff: Your blog software wouldn’t allow me to post this comment with a link to the Taskbar Shuffle homepage, which is on the “free webs.com” domain, without the space.)
I agree with Jeff in that I hate the auto-scrolling mode, however, I think they could use the middle button for scrolling in a helpful way.
The middle button can be page-up or page-down, depending on which direction you scrolled last.
So you’re on a lengthy page, reading, scrolling down, down, down, and notice that the page is really long - what do you do? You eventually use the scrollbar because it’s faster.
Instead, you’d start scrolling down, then just start clicking the middle button to go down at a rapid rate. Same would apply if you wanted to go up. Scroll up to get it “pointed” in that direction, then you’re one or two clicks from being at the top of the page.
You can use emulations of the X-Windows mouse behavior in Windows. Everything is so much easier using copy/paste with the middle button, believe me.
FYI, I think I used the following utility when I was forced to work in Windows: