How to disable mouse actions for Spotlight?

Question

How to disable mouse actions for Spotlight?

Spotlight causes me problems, because it is activated, when the middle button of my three-button mouse is pressed. Many X11 and Windows applications have some functions for the middle button and then Spotlight grabs it and nothing else works as it should. Hence, I would like to disable all such mouse functions in Spotlight and other mouse bindings and use mouse only as a pointing device, as it originally was intended to. How can this be done - I cannot find any such hotkeys etc. defined in System Preferences.

ArNO
2

Mac Pro 8-Core, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Sep 23, 2008 4:06 AM

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Answer 1

Sep 23, 2008 6:21 AM in response to Community User

ArNo,
the central button can be programmed to do anything from System preferences ->Keyboard and Mouse-> Mouse. Use the drop down box to select "none" if you dont want the middle button to do anything.

If you use a lot of x11 apps that require a different set of actions than the normal mouse environment, I would consider creating a separate user account and turn on fast user switching in system preferences->accounts.

Then you can customize the user environment (mouse actions, etc) to be utilized differently for each unique operating environment.

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Answer 2

Sep 23, 2008 6:22 AM in response to Community User

Go to System Preferences, and click on the Mouse & Keyboard icon.
Click on the Mouse tab.
The pane should have a diagram of the mouse with a drop-down for each of the buttons (the default Apple mouse has 4 buttons, so there are 4 drop downs).
Change the drop-down that is labeled "Spotlight" to "Button 3".
Ta-da.

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Answer 3

Sep 24, 2008 4:42 AM in response to Community User

i take it you are not using an apple mouse? It may be your mouse needs a driver that is not built in to OS X. Try searching for a driver for your mouse for OS X made by the manufacturer or a third party and installing the driver.

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Answer 4

Sep 23, 2008 10:04 PM in response to J D McIninch

I have already tried this, but I have no such mouse-diagram and no such settings visible in System Preferences. See: http://users.jyu.fi/~arno/Apple/Mousesettings.png
Is there a way to change the settings from the command line somehow?

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Answer 5

Sep 24, 2008 5:13 AM in response to jedmtnman

This was it! Indeed, I am not using Apple mouse, but Logitech. When I installed Logitech Control Center I got a long list of available options to set for the mouse actions including "nothing". Thank you very much for the solution!

I should have realized right away, that the mouse makes a difference. Since Apple just works by plugging in devices, I didn't come to think about that in the first place.

Yours,

ArNO2

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Answer 6

Sep 24, 2008 5:27 AM in response to Community User

well, they cant support every piece of hardware, or the operating system would come on two DVD's! Ha, Ha.

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