programming and human factors
by Jeff Atwood
Despite Apple's historical insistence that the computer mouse should only have one button-- which led to the highly unfortunate convention of double-clicking-- most mice have more than one button today. In his classic book The Humane Interface, Jef Raskin revisits the earliest days of his involvement with the Mac project and realizes that the single button mouse was a mistake. Mice were meant to have multiple buttons.
What I did not see at the time is that multiple buttons on a mouse can work well if the buttons are labeled. If the Macintosh mouse had had multiple buttons, if the buttons had been permanently labeled, and if they had only been used for their intended function, a multiple mouse button might have been a better choice. A better mouse might have two buttons, marked Select and Activate, on top and on the side, a button activated by a squeezing action of the thumb. This last button would be marked Grab. Some mice at present have a scroll wheel on top that is used primarily for scrolling. Better still would be a small trackball in that location. The mouse would control the position of the cursor; the trackball could be used, for example, to manipulate objects or to make selections from menus that float with the cursor.
Doug Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, also thinks that mice should have multiple buttons:
[Doug Engelbart] believes a mouse should have many buttons ... the only reason his original mouse design didn't have more than three was because they didn't have the technology at the time to make that possible.
Apple didn't ship a multiple button mouse until the Mighty Mouse was released in August 2005. It has four effective buttons, and even sports the trackball that Jef Raskin imagined in his book five years earlier. However, I've read a lot of complaints about the Mighty Mouse, most of which stem from the substitution of actual buttons with touch-sensitive surfaces.
I've used two-button mice as far back as I can remember on the PC. The meaning of the first two mouse buttons are very well defined in every graphical user interface by now:
| Left click | select or activate an item |
| Right click | show contextual menu for an item |
But modern mice actually have at least three buttons. Where's the third button? Right under your mouse wheel.
Mouse wheels have been commonly available since 1996. In all those years, all those millions of mice shipped, no standard convention has emerged for what it means to press the middle mouse button.
Over the last two or three years, middle click has become strongly associated with tabbed user interfaces, at least in popular web browsers. Middle-clicking over a link opens it in a new tab; middle-clicking the tab itself closes that tab. This is happening in enough applications now that I think it's fair to call opening and closing tabs with the middle button an emerging convention. Still, it's a fairly loose convention, and the behavior is only defined for links and tabs respectively, and only in certain applications. What happens the rest of the time when you middle-click?
Another odd middle-click behavior that's defined in both Internet Explorer and Firefox is the modal "autoscroll mode". Middle click once on the page to activate this mode. Notice that the cursor changes. You can now use the mouse to determine the rate of scrolling. Middle-clicking again releases this mode and reverts to the normal mouse cursor.
I personally hate this behavior. I prefer to scroll explicitly with the wheel, and I often trigger this unwanted "mode" when I've slightly missed middle-clicking on a link. It can be turned off in the advanced options of Firefox but I can find no way to turn it off in Internet Explorer.
In the UNIX and X Windows world, the middle button has also meant paste since way, way back in the 1980s. I can't find any evidence of this behavior on Windows or the Mac, however. Pasting into text areas wouldn't necessarily conflict with the tab behavior, but it's an odd hodgepodge of behaviors to attach to a single button.
I hope over the next few years Microsoft and Apple can decide on a set of standard middle mouse button behaviors. It's frustrating to me that millions and millions of mice have shipped with this button, and yet it's a total crapshoot what will happen when you press the middle mouse button in any given application under any operating system. If the first and second mouse buttons have standard, well-defined meanings today-- why can't the third button, too?
I primarily use my mouse to paste text. Considering that I use rxvt as my terminal emulator and Fluxbox as my window manager, copy/paste becomes a single click act. Select the text, left click and a middle button click in the target area. Pretty convenient I should say.
Shriphani Palakodety on March 29, 2008 3:48 AMDoesn't anyone know left-handed users that switch their mouse buttons?
Left and Right buttons don't exist, when ever I write software UI software I call them primary and secondary buttons.
On a more related note I've learned to never assign something to the middle(terciary) button. The reason being when you have non mouse masters try your software, they occasionally push the wheel by accident(I can't even say how many people I've met that didn't know the wheel IS a button), and when that happens they think its a bug, and I get a bug report that my middle button functionality is some sort of mysterious bug that happens while scrolling...
I vote that we remove the middle button, simple is beautiful, and the mouse is beautiful eough with 2 buttons and a wheel, anything more than that is just geekiness.
Robert on March 29, 2008 7:15 AMI would resent the idea of developing a (new) convention for a third mouse button. I, like many before me, have already developed (by intuition) a convention for the use of the middle finger: for waving at {entity}'s blog posts! (j/k)
BTW: The WORST mouse ever has to be that "buttonless" P.O.S. made by Apple. FTW.
Dan on March 29, 2008 8:05 AMRecently, I had to debug a friend's code on his computer using his Pen Mouse (not to be confused with, say a Wacom Tablet pen).
It was so natural and comfortable it has led me to question the design of mice in general. Most manufacturers vary the buttons and aspects of the shape, but few have questioned whether the shape of the mouse is optimal for the task.
The thing that grabbed me about the pen mouse is that I had no feeling of tension in my forearm when moving it about and no sense of pulling on the tendons in the back of my hand when clicking the buttons. When using it, the side of your hand slides on the desk, as when writing with a pen, so you don't need a gel wrist rest.
I have to admit, I am tempted to buy one:
[http://uk.gizmodo.com/2006/07/23/wowpen_mouse_helps_ease_old_ma.html]
I am somewhat surprised to discover they are quite thin on the ground here: major dealers have every type of mouse on the market, except those which are not "classic" shapes. A bit like the way supermarkets insist on having 6 brands of orange juice and no grape juice.
Paul Coddington on March 29, 2008 8:06 AMThe 4th button on my MS Notebook mouse is a magnifier. It's like running a magnifying glass over your screen. The graphics are good and it's a neat feature but I haven't found a single use for it yet.
kmgater on March 29, 2008 10:16 AMI hate the autoscroll behaviour too
I think pasting of Xorg with middle mouse is one good feature
saaya on March 29, 2008 10:59 AMOne more comment from me, on a slight tangent:
In the (mostly Linux but also available for other OSs) KDE desktop, the default configuration doesn't use double-clicking. A single left-click does the "activate" action. Right-click selects and brings up the context menu, or select-without-activate can be done by drawing a frame around what to select, as people have done since the earliest Macs (at least).
Of course, like everything in KDE, this behavior can be reconfigured to a more customary style.
rfunk on March 29, 2008 12:35 PMOnly somebody in-doctrinated in MS Windows could write such utter drivel.
David Ginger on March 29, 2008 12:37 PMOne of the scientist in a school I attended, was used as a cobaye at the xerox palto alto parc for the first mice test. He said the 3 buttons (as on some unices) were unusable. Even though he was optimizing the assembly code of a dec alpha for his fluid calculus and thus was able to handle quite some complexity, he was so repelled by 3 buttons mice, therefore he had a mac with a single button mouse.
I guess he nowadays is an happy 3+ button mouse user, because I guess you miss 2 points :
- simplicity is complex ;
- time.
The WIMP model took other 10 years to fully get accepted as a standard. It seems simple, but apple has a great responsability in simplifying. And user, even those not using mac got use to standardized dialog box, menu, icons, click meaning ... That make them use a simple idea that was untold to them. (the hidden information embedded in the desktop metaphor).
The idea has spread, has stabilized, and it is now possible to question the requirement that made the model readable and push to the next step. One button mice were not an error, they now are. 3 buttons mice were an error, they are now the good choice.
The adoptance of a technology, and its rate of adoptance are far more importance than its "rightness".
Life is a differential equation from which reality derives. ;o)
The problem is everyone has developed different ways of using their mouse. I for one can't stand having buttons on the side as I always accidently click them. But I do love middle click scrolling, as you can get far more precision as to where you scroll beyond the "x pixels" of the scrollwheel. It also means you can do things like slowly scroll a page, which I do a lot when reading comments, without having to constantly flick the wheel.
[ICR] on March 30, 2008 4:00 AMThinking about it, mice are becoming somewhat irrelevant.
I really like Apple's recent innovations using gestures with a trackpad.
- pinching and un-pinching for zooming.
- two fingers held down for scrolling up/down or left/right
- two fingers on pad and click for right-click (context menu)
It really makes up for the one button. It also makes it easier because it's just one big button and the trackpad doesn't care exactly where you touch, etc. With the new ipod, the flicking left/right is also pretty innovative. I wouldn't want to do it for all my images, but it's showing how much more capable.
Mice are great for precision, and I'm a longtime mouse user. I'm not saying wholly irrelevant, but for 'normal' use, trackpads are pretty sweet. I'd hate to use one for vids though - nothing beats mouse+keyboard for that. I just can't see the mouse being as capable as a 2-d touch sensitive surface. I've tried mouse gestures but my wrists start to ache, so it can't be good RSI-wise.
As far as context menus go, I like how Microsoft has tackled it. No longer are we required to right-click, but instead visual prompts indicate alternate behavior is available when the mouse is near. Think Visual Studio and Word and the little drop down icons that appear. MS has made the somewhat overdone concept of context menu's no longer reliant on a right-mouse button, more usable for the masses, and works when you don't have a mouse available (i.e touch-sensitive screens).
Middle buttons should be application specific and customizable. No real software will rely on any more that a 2 button, non-scrolling mouse, because you always have to account for the lowest common denominator. That's life. In fact, after you've been around for a while, you no longer customize anything. I use 2 button scroller mice, default settings, default fonts, default key bindings, etc. I can sit at any workstation and code without having to think about it.
The articles bring up some good points though. Labeling the mouse buttons is a good idea, because essentially that would help users, and users buy software. When software works, users are happy and buy more software. Powerful defaults (as Jeff blogged about once upon a time) can be a key differentiator.
DefaultFallout on March 30, 2008 4:09 AMthe middle click is the most important button in minesweeper. when a number n has n bombs marked around it, you middle click on it to clear all the non-bomb spaces around it.
yossi on March 30, 2008 5:17 AMThe many-function middle button has it's place, however. It seems to serve almost always as a 'special' button that does something that is only needed/wanted in that particular applications. In this way it defies standardization.
I support standardizing its behaivor with tabs, however. That is how I use it most, and the only one that seems reasonably general.
Daniel
Daniel on March 30, 2008 8:53 AMC'mon, you are discussing mouse buttons? are we in the 80s or what!
a.b on March 30, 2008 10:18 AMdefacto for middle click to open a new tab? Rediculous, middle button is for scrolling, CTRL+LEFT Click opens a new tab, once you fix the browsers handling of new windows to actually opn in a tab. Now that's convenient!
=]
Jminadeo on March 30, 2008 10:26 AMYou said :
"Another odd middle-click behavior that's defined in both Internet Explorer and Firefox is the modal "autoscroll mode"."
But this is false. This is not IE nor Firefox, but your mouse driver behaviour on windows swcollable panes. This happens in a lot of apps.
You have not this ugly behaviour on Linux...
On Windows, you can avoid installing driver that cause this behaviour or configure it with its own config panel.
Do not blame Browsers, this not their fault.
I think the X behaviour is good, because it let FF setting its "new tab" behaviour when clickung a link and it uses the "paste" behaviour when clicking a field.
But the best is the trackball of the mighty mouse, because your can click as in X and scroll every direction !
Joachim on March 31, 2008 2:39 AMWith mouse at left hand, my right is on the keyboard keypad, ready to use arrows or delete.
With this arrangement I never even THINK about using any but the basic two mouse buttons. And I execute most actions much faster than I would using just the mouse.
You right-handed people slay me, really.
John Pirie on March 31, 2008 10:36 AMPffft. Middle mouse buttons existed long before MS Windows, and usually (as in 'in xterm') meant 'paste'. (Left was 'select', and right was 'extend selection', along with proper multi-click behaviour on both.) xterm also has a scrollbar that it only really usable with multiple buttons, and had it on the left, meaning that the distance between text and scrollbar was much shorter. Both together made a scroll wheel much less needed.
And for GUI fun: Google for 'interclicking' (and 'oberon').
Andreas Krey on March 31, 2008 12:44 PMI _love_ the "modal autoscroll mode", especially for its smooth and exact way of scrolling. This is what I really miss in the Unix World.
And why not keep the middle mouse button behaviour application-defined? It gives way more freedom in UI-design for applications, without breaking all conventions.
Frank on March 31, 2008 1:12 PMI 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).
Jens on March 31, 2008 1:18 PMIt does whatever you want it to do...
Reconfigure it.
Jonny on March 31, 2008 1:32 PMFor 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.
BillyBrack on April 3, 2008 3:00 AMtechnically, 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?
scragar on April 3, 2008 5:09 AMInstall the mouse drivers, then you can disable that annoying autoscroll.
dave on April 6, 2008 8:57 AMI 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.
David July on May 7, 2008 5:54 AMThe 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.
Dave Harris on June 11, 2008 5:31 AMmiddle mouse button = mute wife.
case closed.
JY on June 11, 2008 9:27 AMMiddle-clicking over a link opens it in a new tab
Hey, that's good to know!
David on July 21, 2008 5:34 AMI 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:
* Select
* Menu
* Adjust
Select is your normal click, double-click, select, etc. Menu opens the application menu under the cursor (no menus on the screen unless you're using them). Adjust would usually do the opposite of Select. i.e. Adjust-click the up-arrow button next to a number, and the number would decrement.
A handy use of Adjust: clicking a menu option with adjust left the menu open. Very useful when you want to check multiple options, so you need only navigate the menu once.
Simple and works well and as expected. How's that for a standard? I guess it'll never take off, as right-click is firmly set as 'context menu' now.
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.
PaleCommander on September 19, 2008 11:36 AMI 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.
SuperSerdo on November 7, 2008 12:53 PMthrowing grenades in call of duty 5
kuba on November 11, 2008 10:46 AMInstall the mouse drivers, then you can disable that annoying autoscroll.
nike shoes on July 27, 2009 9:38 AMI 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.
Aaron Bassett on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMI 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.)
Jon Schneider on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMI 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.
Aston on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMJeff said:
It's frustrating to me that millions and millions of mice have shipped with this button, and yet it's a total crapshoot what will happen when you press the middle mouse button in any given application under any operating system. If the first and second mouse buttons have standard, well-defined meanings today-- why can't the third button, too?
Maybe it would be valuable to compare the behavior of the function keys (F1 through F12) to the mouse buttons. I'll stick to Windows for this analogy, since that's what I'm most familiar with.
In 99% of Windows apps, Alt+F4 closes the current application. In 99% of applications that support a Help feature, F1 brings up Help. Most or all of the other function keys, though, have no standard behavior across all applications; their behavior is application-defined.
Maybe it's okay for the mouse to behave this way, too? Well-defined standard functionality for some buttons (left-click, right-click); application-specific functionality for others?
Jon Schneider on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMI like the middle click to paste behaviour also very much and miss it, when not in an X environment. I agree that everyone has their own taste and probably likes that behaviour the most which someone has got used to or grew up with.
In my case, I was initially a Windows user and switched some years ago to an X based desktop. Interestingly, on Windows, there isn't really such a standardized behaviour for the MMB as it is in the X Window System, so it didn't really feel wrong, because there was nothing I was much used to.
The paste behaviour is especially useful in terminals, where CTRL-C always means sending a signal to the currently running process to terminate, so CTRL-C CTRL-V for copy and paste isn't possible. The problem with the different contents one gets when using middle click or CTRL-V for pasting ist just that middle click always uses the current session wide selection (which means you can't paste some text over some other text by selecting it, because it would just paste what you just selected) and CTRL-V uses what was recently stored by CTRL-X or CTRL-C.
I think standardizing the 3rd button behaviour for all platforms doesn't make sense because the platforms in itself are just so different that you just can't find a solution which would work well on all platforms.
Simon on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMI don't like the auto scroll system. It has too poor sense of control of the scrolling movement. If it was more robust, then I would maybe use it more. Now it feels like the web page moves uncontrolled here and there. This is because the stopping of the scrolling occurs only at an so small area with the mouse pointer. Plus the cross of death icon should vanish and the auto scrolling cease when I take the mouse pointer away from the cross far enough to left or right.
It seems like they invented the auto scroll system and considered it something cool, but then forgot to do proper usability tests for it.
Don on February 6, 2010 10:24 PMThe comments to this entry are closed.
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