I’ve been using a mouse with over 12 extra keys for a while, and now, I don’t think I can go back to a regular mouse. Whether you’re a gamer or spend most of your time in front of a monitor, here’s why you should consider a mouse with extra buttons.

Assign Media Keys to Your Mouse Buttons

If you like listening to music, having the media keys on your mouse would help you save a ton of time. That’s because you likely have your music player hidden in the taskbar or dock or buried under many apps.

While you’re able to Alt-Tab your way on a PC to find whatever app you use to play music, this still takes a few seconds. Some keyboards also have built-in media buttons; barring that, you can use keyboard shortcuts to play, pause, or fast forward your music.

keyboard media keys and mouse in background

However, this means you need to lift your hands to press those keys whenever you want to go to the next track or pause your music. This isn’t much of an effort, but if you like to keep your train of thought and reduce distractions, having the play/pause, previous track, and next track buttons under your thumb will help keep you focused.

So, if a track you don’t like goes onyour Spotify playlistor you want to quickly pause your music when someone tries to talk to you, you may just move your thumb to do so.

a man pressing Ctrl and C keys on a keyboard

Program Your Most Used Shortcuts

While media controls are the first thing most people would think of when getting extra buttons on their peripherals, you may do a lot more with them by assigning universal shortcut actions. For example, I use three out of the 12 buttons on my mouse for media controls, but I’ve saved the rest for various functions.

Since I frequently work with text, I assigned the following global shortcuts to the 12 side buttons on myRedragon M913 Impact Elite mouse:

Redragon Macro programming

While memorizing them took some time, I can now work much faster as I don’t have to move my hand to the keyboard when I want to perform any of these actions. While this will only save me just a second or two per action, the time saved will stack up to about three to five minutes at the end of the day, owing to how often I use these actions.

Use the Macro Superpower

I consider myself an advanced mouse user with these functions, but those who take the time to program their mouse even more deeply could get more out of these extra buttons. Having extra buttons on your mouse is like havinga tiny macro paddirectly on the device you use to interact with your computer.

You can thenassign advanced functions to each extra key on your mouse. If it comes with a driver (which most computer mice with more than three buttons do), you can use it to record the actions you want it to do with the press of a button.

So, in addition to the usual shortcut keys, you may also record actions on your keyboard, like entering a username or a set of commands, with just a click on your mouse. We don’t recommend recording your password as a macro, though.

A mouse with more than two buttons might feel overwhelming for some people. But if you have the patience and put in some time and effort, you can program it to make it the most useful mouse you’ll ever own.