- copy
- paste
- enter
- forward
- back
- Zoom mic toggle[0]
- OSX screen left/right (activated by pushing the mouse wheel left or right).
- Volume up/down (on top of the mouse)
Screen left/right is the most important things I do with the mouse aside from the normal pointing and clicking. For the side buttons, copy, paste, and enter are the overwhelming winners. These alone probably reduce the back and forth between keyboard and mouse by half. I regularly forget that the other three are there.
In retrospect, the correct answer is to select whatever key combinations you end up alternating back and forth between your keyboard and mouse to enter and program it into your mouse. This will reduce switching, which is faster and reduces strain.
My keyboard (Ergodox EZ) has a “hyper” button on it, which is the combination of every modifier key on my keyboard. This lets me program shortcuts like ctrl+alt+shift+command+o, which is pretty easy to reach and guaranteed to have no collisions. I currently only use this for o (optimize imports) and i (indent document) in IntelliJ. It’s a neat trick, but the mouse stuff above has so far been more important to me.
Then again I’m also a manager now, so take that last bit with a grain of salt. I might do more keyboard wizardry if I was a full time engineer still.
0 - This was really useful right up until I built a custom zoom control box with toggle switches (with covers!) for my lights, camera, and mic. Now it’s unused, but I haven’t found anything I do commonly enough to justify putting in this spot. I need to make a post showing this off one of these days.