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Comment by demondemidi | Hacker News Reader

You guys have a middle button? Maaaan. :)

Edit: did y'all miss the smiley at the end of my comment?

When you don't have a middle button, mouse chording (left+right at the same time) is usually configured to simulate the middle button (for instance, the Emulate3Buttons option in the classic X server configuration). Once you get used to it, it's nearly as convenient as clicking a physical middle mouse button.

The trick with a laptop are Thinkpads. some models have three physical "mouse" buttons.

I was not looking for this as a feature when I bought one a few years ago but it had them and it has proved the thing I like about the machine the most.

Some Dell models too, when you choose the keyboard model with a trackpoint they come with the extra set of three physical mouse buttons above the trackpad.

On an x13 2nd gen running Ubuntu 22 LTS with Wayland + libinput, middle-finger ^H^H^H middle-button paste generated by the touchpad driver was almost always triggered instead of right-click, which turned out so annoying, in addition to having lost kinetic scroll/device-specific coefficients, that I left Linux for good and switched to Mac OS instead, which I had already been using 2003-2009.

That is a strong recommendation for me! I really hope three-button mice (no scrollwheel) will make a comeback.

You might like the Evoluent vertical mouse. The scrollwheel and the middle mouse button are separate.

And it is the absolute most comfortable mouse I've ever used.

You can set up eg. a 3-finger touchpad tap gesture for the middle button in KDE Plasma, I'm assuming the same should be possible under GNOME. No need for fancy touchpads.

I think that's a default for anybody using the libinput driver or the synaptics driver.

Your scroll wheel click is a “middle button”

Try clicking the mouse wheel. Most mice do this.

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