middle mouse button

[Pathos]

Linux is supposed to be good for old hardware right?

Why the hell do certain apps require a middle mouse button ?

fluxbox tabs are useless without it and earlier this weekend I spent two hours typing up the output from ruby profiling because aterm needs a middle mouse button to copy text...

the middle button has not been around for that long and only 1 of my 4 computers has one.


[/rant]

[Refalm]

You can configure xorgcfg to let the LMB and RMB be interpreted as MMB.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Mice with middle buttons have been around for a long time (I'd say at least 14 years but probably much longer), the Acorn computers we used at middle school all used them. I've been using three button mice with my last few PCs but I do admint they've become more popular recently with the scroll button doubling as a middle button.

[Refalm]

I have lots of mouses here at home (some of em serial) that have no middle mouse button. Actually, the serial ones do have one, the old PS/2's don't

[Aloone_Jonez]

I know English isn't your first language and I'm not meaning to mock but to educate, mice is the plural for mouse. Hell even people who have English as their first language mess this one up, it isn't obvious it's just one of the quirks of our language.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

Hehe ... what's the plural of moose ... meese, mooses, or moose ?

[Aloone_Jonez]

Moose, I think it's the same like, sheep, geese and fish.

Another one people often get worng is you can have many dice but only one die.

[Refalm]

I know English isn't your first language and I'm not meaning to mock but to educate, mice is the plural for mouse. Hell even people who have English as their first language mess this one up, it isn't obvious it's just one of the quirks of our language.

A computer mouse isn't exactly a mouse, is it?

[piratePenguin]

A computer mouse isn't exactly a mouse, is it?

In England, yes.

[Orethrius]

I know English isn't your first language and I'm not meaning to mock but to educate, mice is the plural for mouse. Hell even people who have English as their first language mess this one up, it isn't obvious it's just one of the quirks of our language.

Actually, check out definition 3 here, but I can hardly claim the legitimacy of the variant word's origin given that it likely started among those of the Net-savvy who lack a formal education - but arrogant claims of creation are better left for another day.  

[GenuineAdvantage]

I prefer to call them miceses.

And I thought in England they called them "jubjubs"?

[Aloone_Jonez]

"jubjubs"?

Never heard of them, perhapes they might in some parts.

I suppose I'm worng but it still sounds kind of wrong, mouses.

[KernelPanic]

Moose, I think it's the same like, sheep, geese and fish.

Another one people often get worng is you can have many dice but only one die.

Erm, surely singular is goose. Plural is geese, "A gaggle of geese".

goose != geese

[Aloone_Jonez]

Alright, I was wrong about that too.

[mobrien_12]

The middle mouse button has been around forever.  

All X11 workstations had one.  Because of this, X11 is built expecting a middle mouse button as the paste in terminals.  That's standard X11, not Linux.  Because of crappy two-button-only-mice, XFree86 and XOrg has a setting so that pressing both Left and Right at the same time emulates a middle mouse button click, but it needs to be enabled in the config files.

You could almost always find a PC mouse with a middle button and you damn well needed one for high end applications.  They weren't quite so common because (a)many mouse makers were cheap and (b) there was the "average computer users are morons" philosophy.  In other words, two buttons would be less confusing than three.  

Then the scrolling wheel was introduced and, what the heck, lets just make that a mouse button too.