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Building the mouse Logitech won't make

(samwilkinson.io)
450 points sammycdubs | 1 comments | 25 Aug 25 15:34 UTC | HN request time: 0.215s | source
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Eric_WVGG ◴[25 Aug 25 17:19 UTC] No.45016257[source]▶
shout out for SteerMouse! https://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/ (macOS)

It's a kind of magical mouse driver that supports nearly every USB mouse made, including _all_ the quirky little buttons and extra functions. As the author said, it's ultra-light-weight, native Mac UI (none of that weird chrome slop that companies like Razer insist upon using).

I use mine with a funky Razer "MMO" mouse that has a funny numeric keypad on the side — all ten of the keys (plus the normal assortment of buttons) can be mapped any way I like.

It came out all the way back in 2005, and has worked reliably ever since. Flat fee for the license, no subscriptions, free demo. Basically everything we all wish apps were.

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trelane ◴[25 Aug 25 17:41 UTC] No.45016515[source]▶
I am surprised folks are still installing software for their mouse.

Guess I have just used Linux too long and expected mice to just work.

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Eric_WVGG ◴[25 Aug 25 18:23 UTC] No.45017126[source]▶
sincerely curious — does Linux natively map the numeric keypad on my mouse? Is there a GUI?
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1. JdeBP ◴[26 Aug 25 04:01 UTC] No.45022136[source]▶
It depends from the quality of your mouse. There are good quality keypad mice, where the numeric keypad presents itself in hardware as a proper USB keyboard endpoint. Those just work, with more than just Linux moreover.

Then there are the poor quality keypad mice where the keys may be engraved as numeric keys, but on the wire the device does things like not present them as keys on a keyboard at all (sometimes as lots of high-numbered mouse buttons instead, sometimes as something else), or present them as keys but using reserved manufacturer-private values instead of the standard codes for [1/Ins], [2/Down], and so forth. These won't work out of the box with anything.

Most office-use "numpad mouse" devices are the former in my experience (although they sometimes do bad things when it comes to NumLock). Alas, there are "gaming mouse" devices that are the latter.