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Comment by jonhohle | Hacker News Reader

> almost nobody has a three-button mouse laying around

With the exception of a trackpad or Magic Mouse (or whatever Apple calls it), doesn’t everyone using a mouse have a three button mouse? Is the scroll-wheel click no longer used as middle click by default? Even Apple’s best mouse, the Mighty Mouse, can middle click.

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Holding down a middle click on a wheel is moderately awkward. Grabbing a mouse with a few more buttons and binding one to “middle” click is much nicer.

I bought an actual three button mouse to work with acme precisely for that reason

If you look besides Apple, there are lots of mouse variants with three or more buttons in every computer shop available.

That… is their point?

I probably wanted to reply one upwards...

The apple trackpads support multi-finger clicks and swipes, though of course the chording is different (you can’t simply press the “middle” button by itself).

Since OP was talking about mice, I wanted to differentiate from trackpads. Maybe people don’t use mice anymore and I’m just out of the loop (though my 12yo uses a mouse with his iPad) or maybe OP is thinking of pre-scrollwheel three button mice.

I've faced similar issues when trying Plan 9, which assumes a three-button mouse and makes heavy use of mouse chording. I had difficulties using my normal mouse wheel USB mice. I ended up purchasing some old Sun USB three-button mice for experimenting with Plan 9.

> I had difficulties using my normal mouse wheel USB mice.

Weird. I do this dozens of times an hour on mine, no problem.

Not by default, they don't. I recently got a Macbook from work, an M1 running the latest macOS, and there is no middle-click. There is no built-in function to enable it, either.

This being the Mac world, there's a well-known commercial tool to provide it: https://middleclick.app/

I found a FOSS equivalent: https://github.com/artginzburg/MiddleClick-Ventura

With a trackpad you can two-finger-tap for right click and three-finger-tap for middle click, at least on Linux. This even works on Macs that have had Linux installed.

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