Using the Magic Mouse with Autodesk Maya on Mavericks

A while back I traveled abroad to attend a conference on animation and of course I brought my (heavy) Mac Book Pro with me. At the airport, I realized that I forgot to pack a mouse and since I recalled manipulating the Maya viewports through my touch pad, I decided to buy a mouse.

After purchasing my very first Magic Mouse, I was in for a surprise, cause basic things that I was used to (left, middle and right mouse click) were now replaced by swipes and just a left mouse click. Since the default configuration of the magic mouse doesn't allow you to configure left/middle/right clicks, I googled for some tips and found MagicPrefs.

MagicPrefs is a piece of software that installs in your system preferences and allows you to setup things like middle mouse click etc. Unfortunately I had to figure out a useful setup, as the configuration only allowed me to setup one finger middle click, two, three (or four!!!) finger clicks, but not a one finger left click, one finger middle click and a one finger right click. After playing with it and trying some settings, I found a combination that didn't conflict that much with the default usage of the mouse:

• The default  click, which is the left mouse button click
• One finger middle axis click to support the middle mouse button
• One finger tab right to support the right mouse button click

Finally I was able to move through the viewport and graph editor along with accessing the right click menu!