Finally — Intellimouse on Windows Button Settings

For years, I’ve used a MS Intellimouse Exlporer on a Macintosh, including OS 9 and OS X. The intellimouse has 5 buttons and the default buttons for the 4th and 5th button (the two on the side) are ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ actions that are pretty useless on a Macintosh (they work, just not nicely) in part because MSIE on Macintosh doesn’t cache or render pages as quickly as one would expect, so…

I didn’t use the default settings. On the 4th button, I used the key command <cmd + click> which in MSIE opens a new window and has a special meaning in the finder. It also allowed me to ‘grab’ a webpage and scroll it using the mouse as if I were using the ‘hand’ tool in Acrobat reader.

On the 5th button, I assigned the key command <cmd + w> which is the standard ‘close window’ key command.

This allowed me to open links into new windows and close them quickly in MSIE, and after I started using Mozilla, allowed me to do the same but with ‘tabs’ instead of windows.

I’ve never had the time to sit down with Windows and really play with it, so I never could figure out how to ‘open a new window in IE with a click + key combination’ and that was pretty frustrating…

Well, frustrated with that one little piece of Windows, I am no more. I discovered quite by accident the special key command that’ll allow me to open a new window with a click, under Windows 2000 at least, is:

<control + shift + click>

So, as soon as I return to the office, I’ll program my Intellimouse Explorer’s 4th button to act ‘properly’ for my use.

Feels good…