Extra mouse buttons

[Scott5114]

So I've been going through a string of breaking cheap mice–drawing road signs is apparently horrible on them–so I finally splurged for a nice gaming mouse that will hopefully last a lot longer. It has two extra mouse buttons on the side, to be pressed by the thumb. I've avoided mice with extra buttons, because I always figured they wouldn't be supported by the OS, and I didn't really need them for anything pressing anyhow. But now I've got them, they are supported, and to my surprise there are utilities that allow them to even be configured now. (Yeah, I know, on Windows they're always configurable, but that's because mouse manufacturers make device-specific Windows software that allows that and they're too cheap to bother porting it to Linux.)

Anyway, so I've got two fancy buttons here I don't know what to do with. By default, they seem to be mapped to the Back and Forward buttons on my browser, which is nice, but I feel like there might be a better use for them. I had them mapped to Undo and Redo for a bit, but I realized that in Inkscape in particular, my left hand is always on the keyboard so I can enter some keyboard shortcut anyway, so I'm not really saving much effort. I set it back to the default Back/Forward for now.

Does anyone else have a mouse with extra buttons, and if so, what do you map them to?

[triplemultiplex]

"throw grenade"
No wait, that would be for gaming.  On the other hand, I've worked on plenty of things I'd like to metaphorically toss a grenade into.

I once had auxiliary mouse buttons toggle me between active windows.  That was decent in a situation where one doesn't have a side monitor and needs to see both windows at a large size so having both crunched into the same space is sub-optimal.  The buttons would flip me between them no matter where the mouse was so that was nice.  That was a long time ago and I think that was a Mac.

[1995hoo]

When I've been able to program them,* I've used them for the browser control like you mention because I use keyboard commands for most text-related tasks.

*I have a wired gaming mouse plugged into my work laptop, but I can't program the buttons because that would require administrator rights that I don't have. I didn't like the mouse they provided me and so bought my own.

[index]

The trackball mouse I use (a Logitech MX Ergo) has two reprogrammable buttons that normally function as back and forward in a browser, unless you change them. I don't really game, so I don't really need the feature of reprogrammable buttons.