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Where do I get a high-quality, ergonomic mouse with a dedicated middle click button? Question
Where can I get a high-quality, ergonomic mouse with a dedicated middle click button?
- I use "ergonomic" loosely, in the sense of "doesn't hurt to use all day". It doesn't have to have a special ergonomic design - just don't be as awful as many generic mice.
- I hate having to click the mouse wheel for middle click, so I want to have additional buttons (often button 4/5 on the side) that I can remap to middle click.
- By high quality, I mean that the mouse should stand up to heavy use for a reasonably long time (years).
Budget is not a constraint, but I resent overpaying for products where the price is obviously driven by a bloated marketing budget or gross inefficiencies in manufacturing.
1 answer
The mouse market is divided into two main areas:
- Cheap, no-name brand mice that are very low quality and hard to use
- "Gamer mice" which are premium-priced, use high quality parts, attempt (with varying success) to consider ergonomics in design, and have a lot of flashing RGB lights
There are vendors of good mice outside of these, but they are obscure, few and have small inventories.
Logitech makes a wide variety of mice. In terms of design, they are good though not great. They are notable for often having high quality sensors, extra buttons, specialty sizes and shapes, adjustable weights while not having too many "gamer" features like RGB. Logitech is notorious for two main problems:
- The switch they use for buttons develops a double click problem. For some reason, they refuse to correct this issue after multiple decades of customer complaints. Generally, the little metal spring will wear out over time and start bouncing, so that single clicks will become double clicks. This tends to start after about 2-4 years of use.
- They like to discontinue good products, so when a mouse you like dies after some years you will have to get used to a new one. If you find a Logitech mouse you like, it is probably a good idea to buy several in anticipation of this (funds allowing).
With "gamer" mice it is easy to find something with good ergonomics, quality components and extra features. The drawbacks will be that they will usually be overpriced, expect you to install special, bloated software (although usually the mouse will work without it), have pointless anti-features like onboard profiles or dpi switches, and godawful RGB lighting. If you can tolerate these caveats: Corsair, roccat, Steel Series, Glorious Gaming, Razer and Zowie are some established makers of gamer mice. Gaming mice will often use overkill components (DPI or poll rate much higher than what a human could reasonably use) so they can market themselves as the "best" for competitive gaming, but the mouse itself is not necessarily designed to last - there may be one or two minor components that is cheap or badly made and fails early, making the mouse effectively unusable.
Adesso and Perixx make some good mice for "business use" - they often have extra buttons, while not including RGB or specialty software, there's ergonomic and wired options.
Kinesis has a small selection of ergonomic mice that are very expensive and have an unusual design.
Xah Lee maintains a page with a comparison of different mouse sizes as well as other mouse related articles. https://thegamingsetup.com/gaming-mouse/buying-guides/mouse-size-chart-table is another fairly comprehensive database of sizes.
Often, premium mice come with a specific program that you're expected to install for all the fancy features (like macros, multiple profiles, RGB light patterns) to work. These programs are generally annoying to use, and the basic mouse features will work with it, but advanced features may require the program. I think a good idea is to check for open-source, third party alternatives to these programs and see what mice they support - that's a good indicator of what other people are using, and it's nice to know that you don't have to use the official remap software. A good example is piper/libratbag https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag/tree/master/data/devices.
Lastly, if you are looking for a trackball, Kensington is a well known company that makes a wide selection of them.
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