Middle Mouse Button Emulation In Houdini
I wanted to post this for a while as being “for the record” since when I searched for it a while back nothing came up. So, for the sake of the search engines (and those interested) I’ll post my grand discovery. Being an occasional laptop user I have only two mouse buttons unless I bust out the USB trackball mouse. In Houdini there is a bunch of stuff you can do that requires the middle mouse button, so I wanted that middle button without having to go search for external hardware. Behold! The answer!:
Click the left and right mouse buttons simultaneously to get middle mouse button functionality.
(Thumbnail image from Declan Jewell under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License)
October 16th, 2008 at 10:38 pm
I think i already knew this! yeah yeah yeah, either way, i actually will benefit from this NOW. hee hee.
what i’m really curious about is from a post from someone that had one of those 8+ button mice w/ programmable buttons. if one of the extra buttons was programmed to be SPACEBAR, couldn’t SPACEBAR+LMB etc be done w/ only the mouse?
i’d love to hear if this would work and what ppl think about customizing their setup, good / bad / too difficult to use the reg setup on another puter?
peace & 42
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
well, this isn’t working for me. w/ the 2 buttons “below” the touchpad or with a usb mouse.
vista 64 bit.
any clues?
December 22nd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
I’ve only tried it on Windows XP though (my laptop) and it seems to work with a two button touchpad. On Vista 64 with a 3 button mouse is doesn’t work. So it seems either Vista sees the mouse hardware different or it won’t work if you have a mouse detected that has a third button or some third button capability. What laptop do you have (so I can check out the touchpad) and is the usb mouse connected when you try middle mouse button emulation? If so, have you tried it when it’s disconnected?
January 28th, 2009 at 7:42 am
Well, it isn’t working here either. Using a laptop with Vista 32 bits, no mouse attached, just the 2 button touchpad.
Right now I’ve kinda given up on finding anything that will do the 3rd button emulation on Vista, all I could find was for linux, and apparently WinXP has an option built in.
As a workaround I’ve now configured my left button to do middle clicks, and I use the tap the touchpad feature to do the left clicks. The Synaptics touchpad driver allows you to configure those buttons, but it does tend to crash every now and then if you suspend your laptop regularly without rebooting.
January 28th, 2009 at 11:09 am
Hmmmm. Well it seems that on Vista this doesn’t work. I suppose I should be glad that I have an XP laptop then. I’m curious if they’ve fixed this in Windows 7 but I can’t test it since I installed it on a desktop.
February 17th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Any hint for the latest (fall 2008) macbook pros running OS X 5.x? Two finger tap is set to right mouse button click. The inability to pan is killing me. So, for that matter any clues on how to pan without a middle mouse button click? Either solution would be greatly appreciated.
February 17th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
I’m not a Mac guy so I can’t help here, but I read that in Shake, using option, then clicking and dragging gives middle mouse like abilities. Not sure if it’s the same for all apps. If that doesn’t work for you it looks like any laptop running Vista or OS X needs to have a mouse attached :/
March 31st, 2009 at 2:19 pm
always late to the party, eh?
so it is, at least, a Synaptics / Vista ( 64 ) prob.
tip: uninstalling driver doesn’t work unless you delete the driver! else it’ll redetect the hardware and reinstall at reboot. grrr.
since i didn’t gain functionality w/o the Synaptics driver i went ahead and installed the newest driver ( 10.1.8 ) … still no MMB emulation.
but thru all this, i now have access to MMB on an external usb mouse. so some benefit.
read online that a Linux driver for the Synaptics touchpad has the feature to let LMB + RMB == MMB. but that’s only on Linux apparently. possibly because it’s a 3rd party driver?? anybody using a non Synaptics driver for Vista64 to get it to work?
i like the solution above ( changing LMB == MMB and tapping the touchpad for LMB ) & might give it a whirl.
other than that, in Firefox, Ctrl + LMB and Shift + LMB open up a link in a new tab and new window respectively.
more later if i ever get around to it… like why use a mouse at all? w/ these “face recognition” webcams we should be able to use LER, RER, SL, SR, NW* etc etc
good luck to all. peace & 42
* Left Eyebrow Raise, Right Eyebrow Raise, Smirk Left, Smirk Right, Nose Wiggle