I’ve used a four-button mouse for years, but I’ve never actually used the fourth button for anything. I come from a Un*x background, so I’m used to using the third button for pasting from the selection buffer. But so far I haven’t thought of any really useful action to map to the fourth button. My window manager lets me assign a mouse button to raise, lower, and shade windows, but I’ve never found these actions particularly useful. So I’m posting here for some ideas. What do you use the fourth mouse button for?
Hey, dude, I got a mouse to review and it has like 10 buttons. And here I am still using a standard one-button Mac mouse, so it really confused me.
Uh, I’d use it for…I dunno. Can you even assign shortcuts to mouse keys? I don’t use Unix, so I have no idea. But if you do a lot of browsing I’d see if I could set it to go back in your browser history, or maybe to open links in new windows.
~Tasha
I use it to open doors, flip switches, or otherwise interact with the enviroment.
Outside of video games, though, I can’t think what I’d need it for.
I have a 4 button mouse, the 2 bigger are the standard right and left buttons, the one at my thumb I use as back button when surfing the web and the 4th at my pinky takes me to my home page.
I have an 8-button Logitech. There are the standard two buttons, the scroll wheel can act as a button, there are up and down buttons front and back of the scroll wheel, another little button even further back from the scroll wheel, and two by the thumb. The up and down work nicely for scrolling and are faster than the scroll wheel, the button that’s really far back is basically a mouse-based version of Alt-Tab, and the two at the thumb work nicely in a browser as front and back buttons. I rarely use those five, but at times they are very nice. I never mapped them for any games.
If you can map it to F5, you can set it to refresh pages, like SDMB forums.
I have probably the same mouse, both at the office and at home- a Logitech MX500. I used Logitech’s mouseware program to map PageUp and PageDown to the two thumb buttons, Home to the button in front of the wheel, and End to the button behind the wheel.
It’s incredibly useful, both for websurfing and for gaming. On a webpage, I can scroll using the wheel, page up and down quickly using the thumb buttons, and go to the end and the beginning of the page with my middle finger. In a game, every one of those are easily mapped, since they’re now considered to be keyboard keys rather than individual mouse buttons.
I have a hard time working on a computer that’s not set up this way. I’ve returned Microsoft Mouses because I couldn’t map keyboard commands like I can in the Logitech utility (you used to be able to, years ago, but for some reason Microsoft removed the functionality).
I have the Logitech MX700.
Right-click
Left-click
Close window/tab (scroll wheel button)
Page-up (above wheel)
Page-down (below wheel)
Switch applications (below page-down)
Command click (thumb button 1)
Move window (including background windows) (thumb button 2)
The third button already opens links in new tabs/windows by default in most web browsers.
you may be able to set it to alt-tab if you do a lot of application switching, I know I was just wishing my mouse had that functionality.
I’ve got the Intellimouse optical, a nice five-button one from Microsoft. Two main buttons, one button on each side, and the wheel can be a button. I have the right side button set st ‘ctrl’ for multiple file select, and the right one to minimize the current window. It’s a VERY handy thing to map a button to.
I have the MX300. I only use the fourth button in games. In WoW, it’s autorun. In shooters, it’s usually zoom.
I second using the fourth button as a “back” button, and the third as an “open in new tab”.
I just bought that mouse last week, it’s the only mouse that fit my large hands (ahem, ladies… 
) The minimize mapping is a great idea!
Your suggestion about using a button for Ctrl-click seems very useful—even more useful than using a button to minimize a window, since the latter can normally be performed with the mouse alone, whereas the former cannot. I think I might try it out.
I always set my spare buttons to “middle mouse button(open in new tab)”, “next tab”, “close tab” and “previous tab” respectively depending on how many extra I have. combined with the scroll wheel, it means I can surf the web without touching the keyboard.