BTNX – Mouse button mapper for Linux.

Linux doesn’t always enjoy the love of hardware manufacturers. But it is blessed with an enthusiastic group of engineers who make life that much easier for the rest of us. BTNX-Button Extension (http://www.ollisalonen.com/btnx/) is such application. This nifty application maps mouse buttons with any combination of keys you want. Days of 3-button mouses are gone (except for Apple who are trying to do without buttons). Mouses now come with lot more buttons now.. I never realized the usefulness of this until I got myself a Logitech MX 1100 which has 8 buttons + scroller (except the 2 dpi buttons). Unfortunately there is no driver for Linux (no surprise there right?). Since this is my first mouse with more than 3 buttons, I went sometime without trying to map these buttons because, well I was not used to using more than 3 mouse buttons.

Anyway I thought it would be handy to map out a few buttons and did a search and found BTNX. At first glance it looked like an app that’s not particularly popular or well maintained. So I was a bit skeptical and thought it would be a real pain in the back to get it to work. But as amazing and surprising as it was, BTNX found all my mouse buttons (I didn’t try the dpi buttons though). And it lets you map the buttons to any combination. Actually it’s upto 4 keys which is more than enough because you don’t want to input a whole sentence with a mouse button right?

I mapped buttons for the browser. Back/forward/new tab/ close tab. And let me tell you, it is absolutely convenient. The best thing is the thumb button, which I have mapped to ctrl-w to close tabs. This is very handy when you those sites that opens up annoying pop-ups. Just a press of the thumb and it’s gone. If you have a multi-button mouse try it out, if not, buy one. It’s worth it.

Tweet This Post