Setting mouse buttons on MacOS
So I just got myself a nice new ergonomic mouse with 7 buttons. However, four of the buttons are defaulted to options like forward/back/home/etc with no option to change it to a simple button click through the software it came with. So how did I take control of these buttons? I'll tell you, because I couldn't find any easy solutions on the web.
Step one: Buy a mouse. I got a cheap-ish JLAB ergonomic mouse. 7 buttons, super comfortable.
Step two: Download the mouse software, Karabiner, and BetterMouse.
Step three: Through the mouse software, set the buttons you want to a letter or number. I set the ones that weren't listening to 3, 4, 5, 6. Then delete that, never use it again.
Step four: Through Karabiner, in the simple modifications section you can then tell it to take any input from that mouse and assign a button-# to it, so set the letters you picked to the button number you want. Use Karabiner Event Viewer to confirm the changes.
Step four: BetterMouse will now recognize your clicks and you can set them to do whatever you want in the OS, or by program.
Karabiner is free, but BetterMouse is paid. There might be another option I'm unaware of, but I think BetterMouse is a solid buy for $10.
Now I need to decide what macros I want to attach to my 2 new buttons.
2 replies
What does BetterMouse do for you here?
I’m just using karibeener to translate the mouse clicks from a keyboard key (2 through 6) to a simple “button-2” through “button-6” but Mac OS doesn’t do anything with those clicks.
BetterMouse Allows you to set the raw inputs to whatever you want, basically.
It supports gestures while holding each button as well as click.
Launch a certain app with a click (Mission control is particularly useful)
Assign things like volume, brightness controls, zoom, left/right scroll, etc.
I was already using BetterMouse with my old 4-button mouse because of LogiTech’s crappy software, but at least that was just giving me regular clicks as an option so I could skip karibeener.
I think Karibeener may be able to do the same customizations BetterMouse does, but you’d have to program them yourself and I am not a programmer.