Enabling Two Button Mode on Apple Magic Mouse

· by · TMO Quick Tip

Out of the box, the Apple Magic Mouse has a smooth surface that hides its two button nature. On top of that, the default in System Preferences is a one button mouse. For those who prefer a classic two button mouse, here's how to fix that.

1. Under the Apple Menu, select System Preferences.

Apple Menu-2

2. In System Preferences, click on the Mouse icon.

System Pref panel

3. In the mouse preferences, check the box "Secondary click" and select the popup for "right". That makes the right side of the Magic Mouse act as a right mouse button. That's used in the Finder for contextual items and by apps for other functions.

Setting Secondary Click

If you don't want to have a two button mouse all the time, you can always leave the secondary click checkbox unchecked and access the right button, as needed, by holding down the Control Key when you left click.

The option to make the secondary click the left button is, of course, for people who are left handed.

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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1 Comments

LESLIEx317537

I turned that on right after I got the mouse.
When you secondary click you have to make sure only one finger is resting on the mouse or it will register as a regular click.

Now they need to add more things like pinch, etc…

Maybe add a 3rd/middle click option.  Something like if you click with both fingers resting on the mouse it will do a 3rd/middle click or 3 fingers down.

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