I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
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Posted by Rod in Apple at 8:41 am on Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Just doing a quick survery through the office and it seemed that many new Mac users didn’t know about the 2 fingered right click on a Mac laptop trackpad. The trackpad is a multi-touch device. Placing 2 fingers on the trackpad and clicking gives you a right click. But it has to be enabled.
Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard and Mouse -> Trackpad
and select ‘Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click’
This will improve your life.
blog
I really don’t know why it’s not enabled by default.
I found out about this feature when I was BootCamp’ed into Vista and needed to right-click, and couldn’t believe it wasn’t on OS X.
Another thing I always missed was being able to middle-click on links in Firefox to open them in new tabs. Cmd+Click just isn’t the same, and neither is selecting it from the context menu.
To the rescue: the “Super Drag & Go” Firefox extension. Drag any link to somewhere blank on the page, and it will open in a new tab. Fantastic!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/137
As a recent convert from PC to Mac (iMac to be precise) the first thing I did was enable the Right Click on the shiny new “Might Mouse”. I still come across Mac users who do not know this is possible!!!
I suspect this is actually more of a synaptic thing than an Apple thing (thought they make good use of it)
I think it’s only available on the more modern synaptic touchpads - works well under linux too (if you enable it) - I’ve actually configured the 2 fingered click to be the missing middle button and the 3 finger one to be the right click
then there’s the 2-fingered drag to scroll - as usefull as the 2 fingered right click IMHO
Another excellent FireFox add-on
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2410
If you use Firefox on more than one computer, you’ll want Foxmarks. Install Foxmarks on each computer, and it will work silently in the background to keep your bookmarks synchronized. You can also log in to my.foxmarks.com to manage your bookmarks from any computer.
thanks! this has improved my life….
I’ve always used a Mac (since 85), never had a mouse with two buttons. I’ve just enabled this feature but I am a little bemused. How will it improve life? I genuinely don’t understand…
Hmm, I don’t see these options on my 3 year old Powerbook which is running the latest version of OSX. I guess this could be that the hardware does not support it? I now have another good reason to upgrade - yey!
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[...] days of telling Michaela you could use two fingers on the track pad to do a right click, found Rod’s blog post, where I read about the feature originally, only to discover that it was not on by default. That [...]