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Reasons You Should Put the Mouse on the Left If You’re Right-Handed
- izzydata 8y agoA lot of these don't make a lot of sense to me. How is freeing up my right hand to use the keyboard a reason to use my left hand? If I use my right hand then it frees up my left hand to use the keyboard instead.
- anonu 8y agoI suppose the idea is you'll suck at left handed mouse handling so you need to compensate by using the keyboard more. Totally agree with your view though. No real compelling reason to switch sides
- hb20007 8y agoIt frees your right hand to use keyboard buttons intended for the right hand such as backspace, delete and numpad.
- mitchty 8y agoYep, also you don't have to move your arm as far to reach the mouse then by not moving over numeric keys. Seems small, but as a righty i've been doing the left hand mouse/trackpad for a while now and it definitely helps on the rsi.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- guiambros 8y ago> ...frees your right hand to use keyboard buttons intended for the right hand... On the other hand (ha!) you lose access to navigational keys that are typically used when you're "mousing", changing between apps/tabs and screens - e.g. alt-tab, ESC, alt-w, alt-q, alt-F4, meta-shortcuts, etc. I noticed that I use the right keys - enter, backspace, delete, etc - mostly when I'm typing, so I want my two hands in the keyboard anyway. For me the mouse on the right side is the best combination.
- jjuel 8y agoAs was stated in the article. Buttons like delete and backspace are on the right so you can mouse select and delete without significantly changing your hands position on the keyboard. But yes that is a little bit of a weak argument.
- Jian-Yang 8y agoI agree. Copy and paste is on the left hand for QWERTY. That gets a lot more use compared to select-delete. Besides, select and delete with the mouse is seldom the most optimal (and you could just cut the text with ctrl-x)
- cup-of-tea 8y agoThe idea is you select with the keyboard, not the mouse.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chapium 8y agoDo most people not alt tab much? This advice would adversely affect my alt tabbing habit.
- gremlinsinc 8y agoI don't even have alt tab... lol so no. Don't do that at all. I just use windows/mod + left/right to go to the next tab over in whatever window is focused (i3wm). Or mod+workspace# gets me to the window the screen I want is in, then mod+right tabs over to the application I need.
- GoToRO 8y agoWhat's the difference between a start-up and a corporation? In a corporation the mouse is symmetric. (so you can move it on the left)
- kennu 8y agoI tend to keep a trackpad or mouse on both sides, so that no matter what position I happen to be sitting in, it's always easy to reach it.
- justacat 8y agoYea, I keep a mouse on the right and a trackpad on the left. It is a good combination.
- mchahn 8y agoI live with a 3D joystick in my left hand and trackball in my right hand. Obviously I do this for 3D cad work. My arms barely move. I go out of my way to avoid the keyboard, even to the point of using the "mouse" for cutting and pasting.
- thecatspaw 8y agowe all know what the true reason is for putting the mouse on the left if you're right handed
- jugg1es 8y agoA broken right arm in my adolescent years forced me to perform the action you allude to here with great precision using my left hand.
- gremlinsinc 8y agoHmm... some people I know, are right handed but use the left for that because of right mouse positioning... lol
- jasonmaydie 8y agoSounds like it would increase the risk of RSI instead of decreasing it
- davidjgraph 8y agoI'm left handed and always naturally used the mouse on the right-hand side. The handy side-effect of this is when I developed RSI in my right wrist, using a touchpad on the left was really easy...
- JamesBaxter 8y agoI move my mouse to either side so I don’t have issues with the general concept but this is nonsense and is just to pad the number to an even 10. “It makes you a more interesting person”
- hypfer 8y agoWhy is this in my rss feed.
- abdulhaq 8y agoWe give up, why is it in your RSS feed?
- zero_intp 8y agoWow, I did this for all of the listed reasons here. I work with the left hand, game with the right.
- Quarrelsome 8y agoGet a sideways mouse instead. That results in your wrist no longer twisting to use the mouse. As someone with some sort of RSI condition it was the biggest difference maker and I could feel the benefit instantly.
- tom_ 8y agoI switched to mousing left-handed about ten years ago, and actually use the mouse more, not less, because it's now so close. I still use the keyboard for invoking commands, but use the mouse a lot more now for moving the cursor, even for quite short distances.
- de_watcher 8y agoWell, when we got mice, they felt kinda optional. So organically we used the left hand for them. I keep it like that now. There are way more buttons on the keyboard - more work for the right hand. Default WASD gaming is also more solid: place the thumb of your right hand on the left Ctrl - you can do a healthy rotation around this point while all other fingers are always above some relevant keys. Mouse on the left is useful if someone is sitting alongside you (on your left) and wants to point something on the screen with your mouse.
- potlee 8y agoThis is very cool and I am going to try this! There are also studies that show there are benefits to your brain when you learn new neuro-muscular skills, like brushing with your left hand.
- dingaling 8y agoI have become generally more adept with my left hand after moving my trackball to the left about 15 years ago. Sometimes i find myself using a screwdriver or knife in the left.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- potlee 8y agoI learned to use my thumb on the trackpad when I am using my laptop. I feel so much more productive, my fingers can stay very close to their home position while my thumb handles minor mouse tasks. I do switch to using my finger for when I need more fine grained pointer control.
- saltcured 8y agoThis is why some of us are Thinkpad devotees... We use the pointy-stick between the G, H, and B keys to shove the cursor around during keyboard-heavy interaction. I use the thumb to click three button zones on the top of the trackpad. To drag, you hold down the thumb and keep steering the stick with your index finger. I also change the settings to use the edges of the trackpad for scrolling rather than requiring a multi-finger gesture. This allows me to do brief bouts of scrolling with much less relocation of the hands. I would even turn off the trackpad mouse behavior if I could do so without also losing the scroll function. It's only ever a mistake when I brush the across it and move the mouse.
- kqr 8y agoRandom story time: I have vivid memories of my (left-handed) dad insisting on having the mouse on the left of the keyboard. I remember it being annoying to move it back to the right side after he had used the computer. But when asked today, my dad – with apparent full sincerity – says it's preposterous and he has no memory of that. Given that he's worked with computers pretty much since I was born, he must remember if that was the case, right? I guess it may have to remain a mystery. I sometimes feel like half of what my dad did when I was very young must have been planting these weird memories as an experiment in order to see how I react to it when I get older. (I also remember him deliberately picking out the bottommost package of diapers in the pile at the dollar store, causing the entire pile to fall and cascade over the floor. Cannot get him to admit it to this day. I did very recently manage to drag out of him an admission of the sleight of hand where he ceased his heartbeat in the wrist, something else he's denied for a long time.)
- justinclift 8y agoAs a data point, both of my parents are like that. Stuff I clearly remember from years ago they don't recall at all. It's probably not unusual.
- kmano8 8y agoThis comment reminded my of an episode of Malcolm Gladwell's Revisionist History podcast on memory -- with Brian Williams' story around an experience he had in Iraq 15 years ago. If I remember correctly, the takeaway is that memory isn't infallible.. not a video recording of the past. He also describes experiments done on flashbulb memories (e.g. what were you doing when you heard about 9/11).. and found that people who wrote down that week what they were doing, then returned to that notation years later, will swear they remember it differently.. admit it's their handwriting but express they must have been lying at the time. Pretty interesting stuff. http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/24-free-brian-williams http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/24-free-brian-william...
- bitwize 8y agoWhen you're an adult, your dad will often "have no memory" of the shit he pulled as a dad when you were a kid. This, I believe, has a couple of related reasons: 1) Plausible deniability. He still wants you to think of him as the greatest dad in the whole wide world, so will deny ever having the slightest fault in raising you. 2) When you're a kid, everything is so much more important, because the world is so new. So what may have been a mere trifle for him, was a disaster for you. And he might have honestly forgot something that you remember vividly for being so devastating. Source: Cannot get my dad to own up to much of the BS I remember.
- SurrealSoul 8y agoI am a left handed person and use a left handed mouse at work (OSX) and a right handed mouse at home (Windows). It helps with dissociating the macros for each system and gives me a subtile work vs play mindset. I would recommend giving it a shot for a day or two if you have the desk space
- lb1lf 8y agoI'm a leftie and keep my mouse (or, if I've got any influence over the choice of pointing device, a trackball) on the right. The biggie is that it frees up my dominant hand for writing - additionally, I've noted that my fine-motorical skills using my right hand has improved drastically over the years, to the extent that I am now almost ambidextrous. (My handwriting is definitely readable when written with my right hand, but I find it more of a mental effort for less gain than simply just writing with my left hand...) Think of moving the mouse over to the 'wrong' side as an exercise in building redundancy. :)
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoI've experienced the opposite - I'm a lefty with the mouse on the right, but with the exception of mouse use my hand has gotten no more dexterous - I still write like a toddler.
- gaius 8y agoMouse on the right, Surface Dial on the left
- nickthegreek 8y agoLeft hander who used to mouse with right, but now uses left due to RSI. The hardest thing for me is realizing how often I used the ESC key (which my left hand used to rest on).
- sevensor 8y agoI did this because I was experiencing intense pain in my right shoulder. Ten years on, the pain hasn't returned and the mouse stays on the left.
- neolefty 8y agoSame here! Except eventually I did switch back just from inertia (and having a right-handed mouse). It's even where my HN username comes from. Mousing on the left felt like weightlifting for my corpus callosum or something. https://neolefty.org/wordpress/about/ https://neolefty.org/wordpress/about/
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- madeuptempacct 8y ago"People who notice that I’m right-handed but keep my mouse on the left often ask me why. It never fails to arouse the curiosity of people who have never seen it before, and it has led to interesting conversations with individuals that I wouldn’t have spoken much with otherwise." This kind of ruins the article. It's up there on cringe with "I keep a pack of gum on my desk and people know me as the 'gum guy'!" Anyway, do you just use a standard mouse or re-map the buttons?
- Slaul 8y agoI have always used my mouse on the left side of the keyboard despite being right handed. I think it comes down to being a child learning to play PC games and not really having the dexterity in my left hand to control WASD and the various keybinds properly with my left hand. So I adjusted to mouse on the left and right hand on the keyboard. It does make it annoying to type and play games at the same time though since I usually have to move the keyboard pretty far off center to get comfortable and if I want to type I have to move it back to center first.
- iliaznk 8y agoFor what it's worth, I'd strongly recommend everyone try using a trackpad instead of a mouse with its advantage being less space it requires for operation. When using a mouse you constantly have to slide your arm around within an imaginary square on the desk surface and regularly lift the mouse to relocate your arm from the edge of the square back to its center. While with a trackpad you arm just rests and a single finger is all you need to do all the work. It's at least more quiet and you don't have to move you arm too far away from the keyboard when you need to use it.
- sky_rw 8y agoProblems also solved by increasing your mouse sensitivity.
- lysp 8y agoYep this. I use dual screen and I only need to move the mouse about an inch or slightly more to move completely over both screens.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoI've been using a trackpad as my main pointing device for probably 3 years now. Macbook trackpads are so nice and large, and with gesture support they're so useful. Upon saying that. If you have a good mouse with good DPI, you shouldn't be constantly relocating your mouse. When I used to use a nice mouse before it went walkabout I was able to move from one end of my screen to the other without ever lifting the mouse. That's how a mouse should be calibrated.
- bitwize 8y agoI've found trackpads to be the worst thing ever. With today's buttonless trackpads, it's difficult to keep the pointer in position while clicking, or to do any kind of dragging. Trackballs on the other hand... I still have my Logitech wired TrackMan with the ball under my thumb.
- DamnInteresting 8y agoI use a standard mouse on the right-hand side, but on the other hand, I have a trackpad on the left. The trackpad is great for quick macOS gestures and for occasionally standing in as a pointing device when my other hand is occupied (hush). Only slightly related: I also have a "shuttle" on the left-hand side, it is wonderful for audio editing. I highly recommend such a tool for podcasters and other sound-making people. It's nice to pan and zoom effortlessly.
- grawprog 8y agoI'm right handed but used to use a mouse left handed for most of the time I was growing up. Using a mouse right handed used to feel awkward. The only reason I really switched was every other computer i used seem to have the mouse on the right and I got sick of switching them all the time and video games started using WASD controls. Before that for games like Duke nukem and doom i'd always used the numpad bur newer games started forcing the WASD. So I just started using my mouse right handed.
- bwl 8y agoI'm left handed and use mouse on the right side. Thanks for putting a positive spin on this. RSI in particular. Unfortunately I miss out on the being an interesting person part!
- wastedhours 8y agoI did this when I was using Photoshop in college and started destroying my right shoulder. Now I have a wireless mouse I switch from hand-to-hand every so often to ensure I'm ruining both of my shoulders instead. Using a mouse on the left side as a right handed person is amazingly fast to pick up. It's also really useful when showing people how to do things on a computer as you train yourself on the mouse, rather than just the muscle memory.
- ectospheno 8y agoRight hand use of the mouse for work never hurt my wrist. Minecraft and WoW did though. I kept the device on the right side but switched to a trackball and rebound any mouse button actions to the keyboard instead. Solved all my RSI issues.
- GW150914 8y agoI switched to a vertical mouse and my wrist pain went away. A good keyboard is also a must. I don’t think there is one “right” way though, it’s all very much a personal choice.
- austinshea 8y agoThe author isn't taking this article seriously, and I think it's pretty mundane in terms of it's humor. What is it that people see in this?
- qbrass 8y agoIt's harmless bikeshedding.
- austinshea 8y agoThanks. I was unaware of this term, but I agree 100%
- foxyv 8y agoIntriguing, but not likely to make me want to change. Everything about my current setup is designed around having the mouse on the right side. Also typing on the keyboard doesn't use the amount of fine movement that my mouse does. It's easy to hit a key with my left hand. Moving a mouse over a 4px border is a lot more difficult.
- mnm1 8y agoFor RSI purposes, both sides suck horribly but it helps to alternate. The idea of having a mouse or trackball off center is often a huge reason for the RSI in the first place. And if one is concerned with RSI, simply using a mouse, even one of the more ergonomic ones is a bad idea due to the large amount of movement. Trackballs, trackpads, and other devices, especially if they can stay centered, IMO, are preferable. I really like the rollermouse, which despite its name, is not a mouse at all. If anything, switching hands constantly is the ideal and this allows that. The magic trackpad 2 from apple is not bad either, but takes a lot more work from the arms and fingers.
- ajoy39 8y agoI have a trackpad for gestures on my left and a mouse for point and click on my right. I am certifiably weird.
- jackskell 8y agoI like to use a keyboard with no number pad, as long as the work doesn't require one. This shortens the reach for the mouse appreciably.