[Newbies] three button mice on windows and macs

[Bert Freudenberg]

Ned Konz schrieb:
> Rainer Keller wrote:
> 
>> Oh, I am able to get all three mouse buttons. It is just that middle 
>> and right button are swapped when I use the same image once on the PC 
>> and once on the Mac. And I can even change that if I go to preferences 
>> every time I switch. I just want to find out how I can avoid that 
>> inconvenience :) Basically the default mapping on windows and mac to 
>> the buttons of a 3-button mouse seems to be different, at least with 
>> the mice that I have. Can anyone confirm that with his mice perhaps or 
>> give me pointers where to fix this?
> 
> I was similarly annoyed by this some time ago and created a Preference 
> called "swap mouse buttons" or something like that. This will swap the 
> middle and right button.

To make Mac and Windows VMs behave the same, enable "3 button mouse" in 
the Windows VM's F2 menu.

This enables the historic mouse button assignment (left-middle-right, 
red-yellow-blue, primary-secondary-tertiary, item-context-meta, 
select-menu-halo) which predates both Mac and Windows.

Because most Windows hackers expect the menu to appear on the right 
mouse button, by default yellow and blue buttons are swapped in the VM.

[OT] To make the confusion perfect for VM hackers, Microsoft numbers the 
buttons 1-3-2 because originally it supported only two buttons (1-2) so 
the third button was inserted between the first and the second. In 
contrast, most workstations had at least three buttons from the start. 
The Mac used to have only one, but can deal with three or more fine 
nowadays. It uses several conflicting mappings of mouse buttons to 
button+modifier key assignments, which makes matters yet worse.

- Bert -