From two to none

Being a long time PC user I have gotten used to the luxury of multiple buttons on my mice. Left click, right click, centre click, scroll – how do I manage on my new macbook that has no buttons? Well that is not quite correct really, the beautiful glass trackpad that equips these devices does have a click button, the trackpad itself is a button. But that still leaves me without my right mouse button and I know that OSX does have contextual (right click) menus.

One method that has been around since the days of B&W iMacs is to use the control key when you click. But that is to cludgy for me. Digging around in the Preferences section of OSX leads one to the trackpad settings requester.

Here we can enable our right mouse button (secondary click) and set it to use the bottom right (or left) of the trackpad. We also have a goodly array of other functions we can enable or modify to personalise the use of our trackpad and make us more productive. I found an interesting article that deals with this issue at http://www.macinstruct.com/node/66