SOFTWARE - MOUSE - 10.11.2011

Working with mouse gestures

Firefox

The Firefox Add­-Ons site (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/) offers several useful extensions for making optimum use of mouse gestures. The most popular extension is undoubtedly FireGestures. First, specify the mouse button that will control your mouse gestures. When you now move your mouse while depressing this button, the movement it makes will be drawn on your screen. You can associate mouse gestures with one of the many predefined actions: reload page, close tab, open all links etc. You can also write your own scripts in order to create extra actions. This requires some knowledge of JavaScript, but fortunately a lot of useful scripts are offered at http://www.xuldev.org/firegestures.

An alternative add-on is All-in-One Gestures. It comes with only a few simple predefined mouse gestures (move forward or backward, open new tab etc.), but it also uses the scroll wheel of the mouse. For instance, you can “auto scroll” through webpages, or scroll via a pop-up window through all currently opened tabs or through all the webpages you recently opened in a tab.

Google Chrome

For Chrome, the most popular mouse gesture extension is Smooth Gestures, which is available from the Chrome Web Store (https://chrome.google.com/webstore?hl=en-GB). By depressing the right mouse button while moving the mouse, you can launch various actions: move back and forward, arrange tabs, open a link in a tab in the background, etc. The action a mouse gesture performs depends on where it takes place: on a hyperlink or beside it. You can create your own gestures for both the predefined and self-defined actions.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer has never really wanted to support mouse gestures. That’s why there’s only one add-on: Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer (http://www.ysgyfarnog.co.uk/utilities/MouseGestures/). This add-on comes with a number of predefined mouse gestures, but it also lets you open favourites by means of a self-defined gesture, and gestures can even perform a sequence of actions.

Windows

To make the advantages of mouse gestures available everywhere in Windows, install the free Just Gestures (http://justgestures.com). Apart from the classic mouse gestures for browsers, this tool also supports gestures for cutting, copying and pasting. Lots of handy gestures are predefined, but you can also define your own - or a combination of a gesture and a mouse-click - to launch a program, shut down Windows etc.

Modern mice

Do you have one of the latest multi-touch mice such as the Microsoft Touch Mouse (http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/en-us/products/touch-mouse/microsite/) or the Logitech Wireless Touchpad (http://www.logitech.com/en-gb/mice-pointers/mice/devices/8417)? This not only means that you can do everything with your mouse, but also that you will hardly need to move the mouse at all. Just let your fingers do all the work!