[grincho]

To me, most shortcuts gain nothing by being on mouse rather than the keyboard (which, of course, has much more room). However, when a shortcut modifies a mouse action or otherwise comes into scope while mousing—that is when you get useful leverage.

Here are the best uses I've put extra mouse buttons to:

1. Double-click. Great for selecting word-at-a-time and really relieves the RSI. If you double-click the double-click button, it turns into triple-click, which selects paragraph-at-a-time.

2. Close window. I live the "window closing lifestyle". If I'm not slamming a browser tab, I'm closing an editor or Finder window—which I often opened by mousing to a link, icon, or existing window a split second before. In fact, I can get quite a furious window-closing hurricane going, targeting window after window, focusing each with a click and then hitting the close-window mouse button. It's a great way to clean up after finishing a task.

3. Option-click. I use this almost exclusively for clicking on a different application and hiding the previous one, a standard Mac behavior that becomes smoother by being one-handed. It also activates rectangular text selection in BBEdit, as a bonus.

4. Exposé/Mission Control. Hold a button, have all your windows flatten out, then mouse to one to bring it to the fore. I have several quicker ways of unearthing windows, but this is a nice fallback when all else fails.

Those are the big 4. I have extra buttons I've been auditioning for some other bindings like Open In New Window and Back, but what I really wish for are...

5. Grab-scroll. I had this with the old ADB Kensington Thinking Mouse driver. Hold down a mouse button, yank on some scrollable content, and the content would follow your mouse pointer, just like today's 2-finger trackpad gesture. If anybody knows how to set this up today, I'd be grateful to hear it!

6. Drag window. It seems like we're all looking for faster ways to arrange windows these days: tiling managers, grid snapping, hotkeys bound to specific positions. In my perfect world, I could drag a window anywhere I pleased but without the expensive targeting of the small draggable region first. If I could place my pointer just vaguely over a window, hold a certain mouse button, and drag the window thereby, I'd be thrilled. I've never managed to set this one up but would love to hear ideas.

Funny enough—and maybe this is just an artifact of Mac software design—I've never found so-called "right click" profitable enough to actually earn it a button. :-)

[jwalton]

Re: Drag window: One of the only things I miss about the Sun Solaris workstation I used back in my embedded days was the "Front" key. Hover the mouse over a window, hit "Front", and that window would be moved to the top of the window stack, unless it was already on top in which case it would be moved to the back. It was extremely useful both for raising a window when you could only see a little corner, and for cycling through all the windows at a particular point on the screen. You also didn't have to make it so clicks would raise a window, and then you could have a terminal in front of a browser window and you could click around in the browser without losing the terminal.

There are many things I do not miss about my SparcStation. Like, opening a web page with too many GIFs in Firefox, which would lock up the window manager, and I'd have to use a colleague's machine to telnet to my machine so I could `pkill -9 x11`.

[cstejerean]

When I was using Ubuntu I could drag a window from anywhere by holding Alt and clicking anywhere on the window. I had to use this frequently because due to resolution switching bugs I’d end up with windows where the window controls were entirely off screen.

I believe there is a Windows tool that implements Alt drag as well. On OS X I remember seeing some work in progress attempt but not sure it was ever fully polished.