How To Enjoy Having 1 Mouse Button

Sylvain Wallez comments on his new PowerBook hardware and among the good and bad he’s found are a couple of comments that come up a lot but shouldn’t. There’s three problems Sylvain is running into that I want to take a look at:

1. No page up/down
2. No scroll wheel
3. One mouse button The solution for all three problems is to keep your left hand on the keyboard. When you’re typing, keep both hands on the home row (asdfghjkl;), when you use the mouse, slide *both* hands down, your right hand slides down to the track pad and your left hand slides down to sit on it’s “mousing” home row – (fn, ctrl, option, command). You now instantly have access to your second mouse button by pressing down the control key – it’s actually much faster and easier than a real second mouse button because you don’t have to turn your thumb under to reach the second mouse button. Now, the next thing to notice is that on a laptop, moving between the keyboard and the trackpad is a very cheap operation (unlike when using an external mouse), the two things are very close together. This is most noticeable when moving from the trackpad to keys at the bottom of the keyboard – like the arrow keys. So when you need to scroll, flick your right hand up to the arrow keys and suddenly you have access to scrolling and page up/down (fn on the left hand and the up/down arrow). This falls down when your editing documents rather than reading web pages etc because the up down arrow just moves the cursor and not the view (though some programs use command-up to move the view and not the caret) – page up/down still work but are no good for careful positioning. This is *far* better than using the side of the trackpad as a scroll wheel though (at least as far as I’ve found). All this probably takes a bit of getting used to, but once your fingers get used to it you’ll probably find that you don’t miss the scroll wheel or second mouse button. Even when I do have an external mouse plugged into my laptop I use the trackpad because it’s so much closer, faster and easier. If however, I have my laptop out of reach or closed and am using an external keyboard and mouse I’m driven absolutely nuts by the lack of scroll wheel and second mouse buttons. But wait! There’s more! Now that you’ve got your left hand on the bottom left of your keyboard you’re ready to fully appreciate the power of keyboard shortcuts. Ever wonder why undo, cut, copy and paste are Z,X,C,V – they’re right there in the bottom left of the keyboard for easy access. Save is a flick of the fingers away, you can bring up the find dialog while your right hand flicks back up to the keyboard and starting typing immediately. If you’re a command tab junky, that’s close by for you as well, though once you realise just how close the track pad is (and get used to flicking over to it) you probably won’t be so addicted to command tab anyway (but don’t loose the skill, it’s still essential on desktops). Lock your dock down so it doesn’t shuffle around all the time and your mouse becomes the ultimate switching utility (short of rapidly switching between two applications which command-tab is king of). Then start mapping special functions to things command click, shift click, command-shift-click, command-control-click, command-option-click, option-control-click, function-control-click, command-control-function-option-click, oi! How many buttons do you need? :) Oh yes, learn to use the escape key – it will cancel pretty much any dialog and a whole bunch of other things too. Plus with your left hand always on the keyboard, it’s really fast and easy to reach. Now if you haven’t given up on me being a stark raving lunatic yet, here’s the tip that every mac user should know about but much to my surprise don’t seem to. Command-H. Try it! The current application hides instantly letting you access whatever is behind it. Unlike minimizing though, this hides all the applications windows and most importantly they all come back at once if you click the application in the dock or command-tab to the app. You can also use command-option-H to hide all other applications, though I’m not sure why you’d bother. Let me repeat myself in bigger type for those who only skim this far down:

Command-H is your friend. Minimizing is for wimps. Okay, that was a bit antagonistic. I’ll stop now.