No Middle Mouse Button?

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >

‌No Middle Mouse Button? ‌

Most windows use the middle mouse button—pushing on the scroll wheel—to pan. This can be difficult on trackpads (Macbooks), tablets, trackballs or with some mouse drivers installed. There is a preferences setting, No middle-mouse button, that you can turn on. With it, hold down ALT or Command and then drag with the left mouse button to pan. When this option is selected, the ALT/Command-Left-click combination, which links trackers together, is selected using ALT/Command-Right-click instead.

macOS : clicking the middle mouse button may display the ‘Dashboard’ instead. To fix that, fire up the Expose and Spaces controls in the macOS System Preferences panel, and change the middle mouse button from Dashboard to “-“ (nothing). You’ll still be able to access dashboard via F12.

If you are using a tablet, you must turn off the Enable cursor wrap checkbox on the preferences panel.

If you have no right-mouse button either, you can use the ESCape key to terminate some mouse modes (such as roto-spline creation) that would normally require a right-click.

Please note that SynthEyes is a designed for use with a 3-button + scroll wheel mouse. It requires many accurate fine-positioning movements, especially for supervised tracking, and a trackpad will not permit you to work effectively, trackpads are not designed for this activity.

Similarly, SynthEyes is designed to take advantage of all three of the mouse buttons. The control, shift, and ALT/command keys are frequently used for additional useful functionality, so it is not possible to dedicate one of those keys to replace the missing button(s).

< Previous | Contents | Manuals Home | Boris FX | Next >

©2025 Boris FX, Inc. — UNOFFICIAL — Converted from original PDF.