Trackball and switching mouse buttons

I acquired a trackball last month. I never had one and wanted to experience a different pointing device. Also, I was interested in comparing its ergonomics with my vertical mouse.

My vertical mouse is a Trust Verto that I bought in early 2021. I decided to buy a vertical mouse instead of those fancy gamer mouses because I started having pain in my right wrist due to mouse use. The use of a standard horizontal mouse involves wrist pronation (palm facing down). Prolonged pronation can lead to wrist pain in some people. It took some time to get used to the vertical mouse, but I loved it as it alleviated my wrist pain. I have been using it since then without any problems.

Back to the trackball, it is a Nulea M505 wireless trackball. It has 3 connection modes: 2 Bluetooth channels and a 2.4 GHz USB receiver. The trackball is very smooth and has 5 DPI modes (200 to 1600). Nothing bad to say about the build quality; it feels sturdy despite being lightweight. It is slightly tented to reduce pronation while using it.

The trackball, however, is a little too large for my hand; I feel that I have to pronate too much to reach the left button with my thumb (primary click). This might not be a problem for most people, but it is for me who has a history of wrist pain. To solve the issue, I switched the left and right buttons on Windows. Now, I move the trackball with my index and middle fingers, perform the primary click with my middle or ring fingers, and do secondary click with my thumb. The primary click is used by far the most, so my hand is in vertical position most of the time. I’ve been satisfied with this configuration, and I don’t feel that my productivity at work has been reduced.

Gaming is a different story. I still prefer a mouse to control the character’s aim. With a mouse, I want the standard mouse buttons, so, after a while, switching the left and right buttons for the trackball became inconvenient. Every time I went to play, I plugged in the mouse and had to reverse the switching of the left and right buttons. Today, however, was different. I decided to play with the switched buttons and see the result. I remembered that many left-handed people use the mouse on the left of the keyboard without switching the buttons in the operating system (example). Actually, many of them don’t know that it is possible to switch them.

If many left-handed people can normally perform a primary (left) click with their middle finger, unlike right-handers who use their index finger, it wouldn’t be crazy for a righty to reverse the buttons. I think that switching the mouse buttons being right-handed might encourage a more ergonomic hand posture. If the primary click (now right button) is done with the middle finger, the hand does not need to be fully pronated all the time, just slightly to press the right button at an angle. This is true for me at least who move the mouse mostly with the thumb and the ring and pinky fingers. Another advantage is that the middle finger seems to be stronger than the index, so you are using a stronger finger for the most used click.

For now, the only exception that I found to this theory is shooting games. In shooters, one has to keep pressed the right button to aim and then shoot with the left button. Gamers usually keep the aim for more time than they shoot, so they use the stronger middle finger to keep aiming and the more agile index finger to shortly press the left button. If switching the buttons, the weaker index finger is in charge of keeping pressed the aim button, and the strong middle finger just do short presses to the shoot button.

I will keep the experiment using the switched buttons even in mouse and for gaming, and will post updates about it.