1  Mouse/Trackpad Skills

You likely use your mouse or trackpad hundreds, maybe thousands, of times per hour while computing. There are skills that can optimize your mouse interactions, so they are quicker, more accurate, and more precise. A video demonstrating some of these skills is shown in the “Practice” section at the end.

1.1 Skills

Practice these skills while reading through the tutorial, during your everyday computing work, and in the practice tasks at the end of this section.

Access the context menu with a right (secondary) click

  • The secondary click/two finger trackpad touch allows you to 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 (secondary) click. These extra movements require multiple extra seconds. These seconds add up to minutes and hours for tasks that you repeat hundreds and thousands of times per hour.
  • If you are unable to access your right click on your mouse, you can adjust your mouse/trackpad/touchpad settings.
    • Alternatively, you can install a third-party app such as BetterTouchTools to create a gesture on your mouse or trackpad that will mimic a right (secondary) click. A third-party app will also allow you to enable many other gestures. For example, this includes the center (tertiary) click native to many PCs, which scrolls and opens new tabs in a browser.

Left (primary) 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.
  • Single click in the margin just the left of a line and that line may be highlighted, depending on your application.
  • Double click in the margin just the left of a 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, access the renaming function of files and folders in File Explorer (PC) and Finder (Mac).

Scroll and screen ratios

  • 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 so you can adjust how much of the document you see at a given time.

1.2 Practice

Play Minesweeper or Solitaire

Practice these skills in the prompts below. Of note, another fun 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 tasks to a word processor, you can work within that downloaded document.

  1. Using only your mouse/trackpad:

    1. Highlight this sentence with a triple or single click.
    2. Highlight just the bolded letters in this line with a left click-hold-drag gesture
    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.

1.3 Assessment

Visit the assessment for mouse/trackpad skills or download a local copy of the assessment.