Section 1.2. That One-Button Mouse

1.2. That One-Button Mouse

Every Windows mouse ever made has at least two mouse buttons . You use the left one for selecting things, and the right one for making shortcut menus appear (Figure 1-2). If you have a newer mouse, it might even have a scroll wheel in the middle for efficiently scrolling long documents and Web pages.

The mouse that came with your Mac, however, has only one mouse buttonthe equivalent of the Windows left mouse button. You use it exclusively for selecting and clicking things.

That's not to say that you can't "right-click" things with your one-button mouseyou can, as shown in Figure 1-2. On the Mac, though, you're supposed to produce shortcut menus by holding down the Control key as you click things on the screen.

Furthermore, if this Control-clicking business bothers you, you'll be happy to hear that two-button mice work just fine on the Mac, too; they let you go back to right-clicking things, and the little scroll wheel works, too.

You can connect the two-button USB mouse from an old PC, for example, or buy one for $10 or $15 to use with your Mac. (Heck, even Apple sells something called the Mighty Mouse. It looks like it has no buttons at all, but its single, unified shell has left-side and right-side sensors that let you left- and right-click.)


Note: You generally don't need to install driver software for USB mice, even if they're designed for use with Windows. Still, it's worth checking the manufacturer's Web site for Mac OS X drivers, since such software may give your two-button mouse even more features than it has by default. For example, the driver software may make a mouse's third and fourth buttons trigger special functions.

Figure 1-2. Unless you use your own two-button mouse, you'll have to use the Control-clicking method to produce the shortcut menus, shown here in Windows (left) and on the Mac (right).




Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual
Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual
ISBN: 1449398537
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 371

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