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Who needs a Mighty Mouse? Hold shift for horizontal scrolling

John Gruber linked the blog of Mike Rohde, a visual designer who discovered a slick scrolling trick built into Mac OS X: with a standard scrolling mouse, you can hold the shift key in most apps to scroll horizontally. Mike cites his day job apps like Photoshop and Illustrator, but this seems to work in NetNewsWire, Firefox and iTunes as well. I'm not sure if this is a 10.4 Tiger-only thing (anyone care to share?), but it's a handy little trick for those who aren't exactly enamored with the Mighty Mouse.

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Hardware OS Tips and tricks

John Gruber linked the blog of Mike Rohde, a visual designer who discovered a slick scrolling trick built into Mac OS X: with a standard...
 

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matt

hi there. i'd like to configure the mouse to be able to zoom and scroll w/ custom commands (i.e. instead of holding ALT to zoom in and SHIFT and CRTL to go vert/horiz, i'd like to use CTRL to zoom, etc.) so i've tried going to Keyboard Shortcuts but i cannot seem to find these commands listed/available for custom edit - might you know how to configure???

October 24 2006 at 11:32 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Sherman Homan

There are literally hundreds of keyboard and mouse tricks. I discover a new one just about every week.

September 29 2006 at 3:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
h4l9k

im new in mac but when start using my macbook discover this horizontal scrolling, it work on almost every applications except java-based at lest in my case

September 27 2006 at 1:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Christopher Bowns

Popover animated ads in the middle of the webpage are NOT COOL.

September 25 2006 at 7:28 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Bart

This works with two finger scrolling on my G4 iBook too! Try it!
Hold down Shift and drag horozontaly using two fingers.

September 25 2006 at 5:34 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Torley

I'm a YUGE fan of multi-button mouse functionality, and as such, terribly fond of the "meat and potatoes" design of my Microsoft Intellimouse Optical, side buttons and all.

However, on my MacBook Pro with a trackpad, while it's nice to be able to use two fingers to scroll, I find I miss having a right-click, as well as other multi-button mouse fancies, so I resort a lot to keyboard shortcuts. For example, holding Option while tapping the Up and Down arrows as I make my way through web pages.

Alas, holding Shift to scroll horizontally doesn't appear to work on this Firefox on a PC--but I wish it did! :)

September 24 2006 at 2:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mathie

Woohoo! At last I can get back 2d scrolling after my mighty mouse decided to stop scrolling at all (and so got binned).

September 24 2006 at 7:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Estilo

Gotta love these small tricks, :) Nice!

September 23 2006 at 3:04 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Chartier

And as we all know, if *some* people knew about this, that means everyone else is a blind idiot and/or fool! Why can't everyone else stay as on top of things as I am, and know and read all the same articles, news bits and software tips as I do? *Gawd,* I can't believe there are such morons out there who didn't know the same thing I did.. it makes me weep for humanity!

Get a grip guys, stuff like this happens all the time. Some people know about some things, while others didn't. Now they do. Instead of being smugly condescending, try being happy that people are learning more about a great operating system.

Please.

September 23 2006 at 1:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Magnus

I belive this feature was introduced with column view in Finder. Pretty old stuff!

September 23 2006 at 12:21 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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