Configuring your Logitech MX Revolution for maximum productivity

Hi,

personally I use SteerMouse to configure my Logitech MX Revolution because it lets me easily configure the buttons for different applications without having to redo all of my standard button settings. The Logitech Control Center forces you to ALWAYS assign ALL buttons they way you want them to behave and I don’t like the default behavior of the buttons.

Safari, NetNewsWire and Mail are the applications I used most often and so I configured the buttons to do different things depending on the application I’m working in.

In Mail I can easily check for new mails and I have the middle mouse button configured to do a “cmd + Click” so that when I open URLs, they open in the background (this behavior of Mail.app drove me nuts).

In NNW I configured the tilt wheel to go back and forth in articles, and other buttons to open the selected item in Safari, “press” space to read an article directly in NNW, refresh all subscriptions or flag an item.

Safari has the most configuration:
- Tilt wheel left right -> cycle through tabs
- Forward button -> close tab
- Back button -> go back
- Search button -> make a RTF clipping to DEVONthink
- Middle click -> middle click
- Side scroll up -> home button
- Side scroll down -> end button
- Side scroll click -> invoke 1Password’s “Fill login” (Safari constantly loses all of my cookies)

I have more configurations for other applications like Pixelmator, Path Finder, DEVONthink, iTunes… but I think you get the idea.

The Logitech MX Revolution is really a nice mouse and if you sit in front of your PC the whole day, I think you should really invest in your gear to squeeze the maximum productivity out of it.

Greetings

Hi Tom,

I’m pretty sure you can do all of the remappings in LCC but as I stated above LCC has default behaviors for all the buttons and everytime you make a new configuration for a specific app it reverts your default behaviors to its defaults.

One example:
The search button is by default (LCC’s default) mapped as application switcher, as far as I remember. Say you have the search button remapped to Spaces and the “tilt wheel left” to quit an application by default and you want the “tilt wheel left” to do something different in Safari.

You create a new profile for Safari and instead of having the search button as a Spaces trigger (as you remapped it in YOUR defaults) you get LCC’s default behavior of switching application, so you have to remap it to trigger Spaces even though you just want the “tilt wheel left” to do something different.

I think this “problem” isn’t something that so many people will run into because the majority will just map their keys and use them in all applications, but when you have many different profiles for different applications and you just want to remap 1 or 2 buttons for that particular application, it gets really really annoying having to remap everything to your defaults instead of the LCC’s defaults.

SteerMouse adheres to your defaults everytime you create a new profile so this issue doesn’t occur.

BTW I just found this blog post which shows that LCC’s driver has a security issue with Spaces: http://disjointthoughts.com/2008/11/04/spaces-logitech-mouse-security-hole/

Greetings

I use a Logitech MX Revolution with LCC, but my config is still a work in progress … right now, I activate spaces with the button you use to pull up the app switcher. For the two side buttons: one is for Launchbar and one is to go back. I like both your and Patrick’s suggestions. I need to play around with it some more to see what works best. Good tip about spaces, by the way. I think you’re right about Logitech: I, too, question their Mac commitment.

Great site, by the way! I’ve subscribed to your feed and look forward to more posts.

Hi Tom,

if you have any questions about Final Cut you can email me about it.

Greetings