I have a wireless USB mouse by Anker () with a few extra buttons that I would like to take advantage of on my Macbook Pro (running OS X 10.11.6). On their website, it says that these buttons can only be used in Windows browsers. Is there a way I can use a third-party tool or something else to allow me to use these extra buttons on my Mac?
Thanks.
16 Answers
If you just want the side buttons to do back/forward in ANY app/environment, this app is the most basic, streamlined one I've found for this purpose on Mac OS X, and completely free (donate!).
8A solution that comes builtin with Mac OSX (without third-party apps nor workarounds) is setting the mouse three buttons within Settings, Mission Control, Keyboard and Mouse Shortcuts. Here you'll be able to select the action for each of the buttons.
I made Mac Mouse Fix.
It lets you remap your side buttons to back and forward among many other cool features that make your mouse better.
On top of that it's open source, lightweight, easy to use and 100% free.
There are a few apps that can do this task. I use SteerMouse [$20] which can handle mice with up to 15 buttons.
The latest v5 can now use 'chords' [multiple buttons to generate a separate action] & modifier keys - that gives a potential 24 actions for every button, different for every app if you wish... if you can ever think of that many ;)
USB Overdrive is another I can think of, but I've never used that one, so can't comment.
4If you don't want to use extra software, one funny workaround is to connect a Mighty Mouse (not a Magic Mouse) and go to the mouse preferences. The Mighty Mouse has buttons 3 and 4, the scroll wheel click and side buttons squeeze respectively, and you can map those to custom actions. Then you can connect your third-party mouse, and those buttons on it will still perform the actions you set. Haven't done this in a while, so can't confirm it works in the latest macOS. There must be a defaults write command to do this instead, but I can't figure it out; the mouse prefs files just have integer values for buttons 3, 4, and 5 that don't seem to affect anything when changed.
If you just want the extra buttons to control Exposé/Mission Control, you can do that in the Mission Control prefs without connecting a Mighty Mouse.
I was able to enable the "previous" and "next" mouse buttons with these commands.
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleHIDMouse Button3 1
defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleHIDMouse Button4 1You can see your settings with defaults read com.apple.driver.AppleHIDMouse.
