Apple Magic Trackpad and MiddleClick

Unlike the Magic Mouse (which hurt my hand within minutes of beginning to use it), Apple’s Magic Trackpad is a rather nice cursor input device. It’s identical to the touchpad in Apple’s newer MacBook Pro family, where multi-touch is used in conjunction with an entire touchpad that clicks, eliminating the need for both buttons and tap clicking. I personally cannot stand tap clicking on touchpads, so I will normally disable it and either have one hand on the button and the other on the pad (when I need to work quickly) or lift my finger to move it to the pad to click. With this device one can simply use multi-finger gestures for scrolling and app switching while clicking the entire pad with one (or more) fingers.

As the Magic Trackpad ships, Apple has support for scrolling, primary and secondary clicking (left and right), application switching, and Exposé activation. What Apple (stupidly) did not include is any method of sending a tertiary (middle) click which is the de-facto method for opening links in new tabs in all modern web browsers. Without this one has to either hold Command (⌘) and click (a two-handed affair) or secondary/right click and select open in new tab (slow). Both of these make quickly reading web pages difficult.

Thankfully a guy by the name of Clement Beffa wrote a MiddleClick, a utility which makes three-finger taps (or clicks), an input not captured by Apple’s software, send a middle click. The version (currently) on the main page (MD5 checksum e7a7e1b5f5e55cb5ffac6d091f03f8c9) is slightly broken and the 3 Finger Click option in the menu doesn’t work. However, this version (MD5 checksum 1b02e356684c40bbbb21cf83f70c52ca) does work properly and I’ve been using it to three-finger click for a few hours now. This makes basic web browsing and reading pages a one-handed affair

The only complaint that I now have about the Magic Trackpad is that the pivot for clicking is near the top of the pad, which makes clicking the pad near the top more difficult than when it is pressed near the bottom. This isn’t terrible, though, as clicking the pad near the bottom does not feel abnormal and is what I (currently) find myself doing naturally.

For the time being I’ve unplugged my mouse, and I’m quickly finding the Magic Trackpad to be quite comfortable to use. It’ll take another week or three before I’m sure that I’m comfortable with it, but for now things seem to be going quite well. I’ll need to go back the a classic mouse when using EAGLE for PCB CAD, but that’s a special case because quickly using it requires the one to do things such as hold one mouse button while clicking another.