SensibleSideButtons lives in your menu bar. And there's no more confusion if the cursor is over a non-navigable or out-of-focus window when the side button is clicked: the command simply resolves to nothing instead of triggering an application-wide shortcut. Pretty much perfect! All four windows, including Xcode and Documentation, perform exactly as one would hope. Here's a demo of the side button behavior when using SensibleSideButtons. All we're doing is dusting off some slightly forgotten parts of macOS. Best of all, the code is native, clean, and very simple. There's no blinking menu bar, no annoying noises, no fear of errant keyboard shortcuts messing with your workflow. Navigation commands are sent directly to the view under your cursor, alleviating mistakes and even (hypothetically) allowing multiple navigable sections within a single window to be controlled independently. Navigation now works in practically any application with a history, even if there aren't any keyboard shortcuts bound to forward and back. In contrast to the above two approaches, SensibleSideButtons makes your side buttons behave like bona fide navigation keys. You learn to avoid them unless necessary. Or, if you're unfamiliar with an app, how can you be sure that the side buttons won't trigger some state-changing shortcut, as they do with indentation in Xcode? Keyboard shortcuts are unpredictable, and this makes the side buttons feel unsafe in practice. For instance: if you have lots of windows open in an application, how do you know from a glance which one your navigation click is going to? In the video, you can see the navigation commands going to Finder even when the cursor is hovering over a different window. Side mouse buttons mapped to keyboard shortcuts, via Logitech Options.ĭecidedly less useless, but still frequently confusing. Here's a demo of the keyboard shortcut binding in action. In other words, you can't rely on this approach. Behavior can be unpredictable in some contexts depending on how the foreground application has its keyboard shortcuts configured. In contrast to every other mouse function, each side click is sent to the entire foreground application instead of the specific view under your cursor. Whenever you click one of the side buttons, you either get a distracting menu bar blink or an obnoxious alert sound. Unfortunately, while this works fine in most applications, it still doesn't feel very natural. This behavior can't be configured natively in System Preferences, but it's used in everything from Logitech's mouse software to third-party tools like USB Overdrive. The most common fix for this silly behavior is to rebind the side buttons to ⌘+ - standard, OS-wide shortcuts for navigating history. (And unlike with an actual middle click, you can't even click to close the tabs afterwards.) Frankly, it's not clear to me why these buttons do anything at all! Except for opening new links in browsers, there's no response in any of the apps. Your browser does not support the video tag.ĭefault side mouse button behavior in macOS.Īs you can see, this binding is completely useless. Each of the four windows already has a history. The colored circles stand for button clicks, with orange representing the bottom/back side button (M4) and blue representing the top/forward side button (M5). Here's a demo of how the side buttons work in macOS by default. Once you've gotten used to this feature, it's hard to get by without it. Compare to Windows, where those same buttons allow you to fluidly navigate back and forward in practically any window with a history. By default, they act as a sort of crippled middle click, consigned to opening new links out from under you when you least expect it. If you use third-party mice with your Mac, you've surely noticed just how useless the side buttons are.
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