1  Mouse/Trackpad Skills

1.1 Theory

You interact with your mouse or trackpad hundreds, maybe thousands, of times per hour. Expert computer users can perform each of the following skills within one or two seconds. A gif of these skills in action are included in the “Practice” section at the end.

Access the context menu with a right click

  • Quickly access a variety of useful functions specific to the application you are using.
  • On a Mac, you can press Ctrl+click to mimic a right click. Note that this takes a lot of time. If you are unable to access your right click on your mouse, you can adjust your settings, or install a third party app such as BetterTouchTools to create a gesture on your mouse or trackpad that will mimic a right click. A third party app will also allow you to enable many other gestures. This includes the center click native to most PCs, which opens new tabs in a browser.

Left click, hold, and drag the mouse

  • In a browser, text editor, or word processor, this will highlight text.
  • In your Finder (Mac)/File Explorer (PC) windows and at the top of your computer programs/applications, this will let you drag items across the screen.

Double and triple clicks

In a browser window, text editor, or word processor, this will highlight text. Depending on where you double click, different amounts of text will be selected. Note that some of these gestures may not work in all applications.

  • Double click on a word, and that word will be highlighted.
  • Triple click on a word, and the entire paragraph/chunk will be highlighted.
  • Double click to the left of an entire line, and that line may be highlighted, depending on your application.
  • Triple click to the left of an entire line, and the entire paragraph/chunk may be highlighted, depending on your application.
  • Quadruple click far to the left of an entire line, and the entire document may be highlighted, depending on your application.
  • Two clicks, too slow to be captured as a double click, accesses the renaming function of files and folders in File Explorer (PC) and Finder (Mac).

Scroll

  • Almost all computer users are able to scroll easily with a mouse/trackpad.
  • Ctrl+Scroll (PC) or Cmd+Scroll (Mac) may adjust the zoom ratio of your screen.

1.2 Practice

Play Minesweeper or Solitaire

A number of prompts to practice these skills are included below. Another way to practice is with Minesweeper and Solitaire. You can find these games online by googling “Minesweeper” or “Solitaire”. They were designed to teach rapid mouse gestures, including:

  • left click,
  • right click,
  • drag and drop, and
  • precision with your cursor.

Tasks

Copy and paste tasks 1-2 into a text editor of your choice. This will most likely be Google Docs or Microsoft Word. A more sophisticated (not Apple’s Pages) text editor is also fine.

Note that if you have already completed “Environment Setup,” you will have the entire tutorial downloaded to your computer. Instead of copy-pasting the text in this section to a word processor, you can work within that downloaded document.

  1. Using only your mouse/trackpad:

    1. Highlight this sentence by double clicking on this line.
    2. Highlight just the bolded letters in this line with left click-hold-drag cursor.
    3. Highlight this sentence, right click to access the context menu, cut it, and copy it back onto this line.

  2. Practice the skills above until you can do them in 30 seconds or less. The video below demonstrates these tasks in 16 seconds.