This is a quick little tip that I discovered a few weeks ago as I tried to figure out a way to work in Chrome without browser gestures. I grew up as a Windows user, so my way of thinking about right click in general is as a context-sensitive menu opener. Right click is for opening menus, and left click is for selecting stuff.
But one awesome thing about Mac OS X is that the right click — which I didn’t realise even existed on the Mac before I switched two years ago — is actually more flexible than it is on Windows because it can functions as both “menu” and “select” if you hold it down and release it.
Here’s an example:
If you don’t have gestures or dedicated hardware buttons to move back in the browser, all you need to do is hold down right click on the body of a webpage, drag the mouse over the “back” button in the resulting context menu, and let go. This click-hold-release workflow is more fluid than right clicking to bring up a menu, hovering over it, and left clicking. In fact, once you get used to it, it feels a lot like the fancy multitouch gestures we’re getting used to on touch devices and trackpads.
This tip isn’t just limited to browsers either. It has worked in every single Mac app I’ve tried it in (Pixelmator, Finder, iTunes, etc.), so if you’d like to increase your Mac mouse productivity ever so slightly, you might want to get right on this little trick (har har…har).
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