Augustus Skipworth & SkipWire Laboratories proudly present
MacHancer is a menu-bar app for Mac that gives your mouse the powers of a trackpad. Hold Button 5 and swipe for Mission Control, App Exposé and Spaces. Hold Button 4 and flick a window into place. Middle-click the Dock, scroll smoothly, and rebind anything to anything.
Two buttons. Zero days off. Further!
Ships with sensible defaults, and every one of them is yours to change. No account. It collects no data and makes no network connections.
“On the desk of the future, ladies and gentlemen, no hand will travel to a corner of the screen to ask for a window. The window will be told where to go. And it will go.” The Narrator
The accountants offered to estimate this. Press them yourself; it's more accurate. No side buttons? Hold the 4 or 5 key instead.
Hold Button 5 (or the 5 key) anywhere and swipe: left or right moves between Reels, up shows every Reel at once, down spreads out the exhibits. Hold Button 4 (or 4) over any picture and flick it to a side of the screen. Your browser's Back stays where it is. Mr. Skipworth insisted.
A young Skipwright has brought a laptop to the Founder's desk. She lays four fingers on its trackpad and pushes them upward. Every window on the screen leaps back and arranges itself in rows, like a regiment.
The Founder watches this twice. He does not touch the trackpad. He has a mouse. It is brass where it is allowed to be, and it has not been asked to do anything new since it was delivered.
The Founder
“What did she do?”
Miss Pell
“Swiped.”
The Founder
“I don't paw at things, Pell. I point at them. Make the mouse do that.”
Miss Pell turns the mouse over in one hand. On its left flank are two small buttons nobody in the hangar has ever pressed on purpose.
Miss Pell
“These do Back. And Forward.”
The Founder
“Forward is the only direction I recognize. Further! The other one can tidy the windows.”
She takes the mouse to the workshop under the oak. It comes back on Monday. Nothing about it looks different. Everything about it is.
| On a trackpad you would | With MacHancer, you hold, move, and let go |
|---|---|
| Swipe up with three or four fingers | Button 5, swipe up. Mission Control. |
| Swipe down with three or four fingers | Button 5, swipe down. App Exposé. |
| Swipe sideways between full-screen apps and Spaces | Button 5, swipe left or right. The next Space over. |
| Drag a window to a screen edge and wait | Button 4, flick. Left or right half, up to fill, down to restore, down again to minimize. |
| Glide with momentum | Smooth scrolling. Eased, trackpad-like motion for a plain wheel mouse. |
| Right-click a Dock icon and hunt through the menu | Middle-click it. An action you chose for that icon runs at once. |
A working replica of a Mac, built on this page. It answers to your real Button 4, Button 5, middle button and wheel, the same way MacHancer's defaults do. No side buttons? Hold the 4 or 5 key and move the pointer, or use the buttons beside it.
Point at the card and press every button your mouse has, one at a time, and roll the wheel. The census counts what your browser can see and tells you which of MacHancer's defaults you'd get on day one. Nothing leaves this page.
Point here. Press everything.
| Button | Seen | MacHancer default |
|---|---|---|
| Left | not yet | Left click, as nature intended |
| Right | not yet | Right click |
| Middle (3) | not yet | Middle-click the Dock for a per-icon action. With ⌃⌥⌘, close the window under the pointer. |
| Button 4 | not yet | Hold and flick to tile windows. Back, in Safari. |
| Button 5 | not yet | Hold and swipe for Mission Control, App Exposé, Spaces. Forward, in Safari. |
| Wheel | not yet | Smooth, eased scrolling, if it's a notched wheel |
| Button 12 | reserved | It is his. |
Roll the wheel over the card. A notched wheel sends coarse, even steps; a trackpad or Magic Mouse sends a fine stream. Smooth scrolling is for the first kind.
Some browsers keep Buttons 4 and 5 for themselves and never tell the page; Safari, notably, reports them as a middle click or not at all. If yours goes missing here, MacHancer still sees it: the app reads the mouse directly, not through a browser.
Changes apply the instant you make them. Hold Button 4 over any picture and flick it left, right or up to see it large.
Hold Button 5 and swipe: up for Mission Control, down for App Exposé, left or right to change Spaces. The swipe is measured and the action runs when you let go, so it works every time; an optional live transition is in Settings.
“I have not lifted four fingers at once since 1974. I don't intend to start for a laptop.”
Hold Button 4, flick, release. Left or right tiles the window under the pointer to that half of the screen, up fills it, down restores its previous size, and down again minimizes it. ⌃⌥⌘ and the arrow keys do the same from the keyboard.
“A window should know its place. Now it does. Its place is wherever I flicked it.”
Choose a middle-click action for each Dock icon: new window, bring to front, hide, quit, reveal in Finder, or nothing. Folders, files and the Trash get their own sensible choices.
“Eleven icons in my Dock. Each one knows exactly what I want. That's more than I can say for the board.”
Eased, trackpad-like motion for a wheel mouse, with adjustable distance, smoothness and acceleration. It is for wheel mice only; trackpads and Magic Mouse already glide.
“A wheel that goes clunk is a wheel that has given up. Mine glides. So does the desk.”
Pair any mouse button or key with a click, double click, hold, drag, chord or swipe, add modifier keys, and reverse left and right per binding. Send keystrokes, launch apps, run Shortcuts, or chain steps into a macro.
“Every button on that mouse is on my payroll now. Yours too.”
Limit any binding to chosen apps, or exclude apps. Back and Forward in one place, something else everywhere else. Settings export to a single file and import on another Mac.
“Different rooms, different rules. I have four of everything in every room, including the pantry.”
Every gesture on this page is an ordinary binding you can edit, delete or replace. Start from the built-in set or build your own from nothing.
Button 3 and up, or a keyboard key, with any mix of ⌃ ⌥ ⇧ ⌘.
Click, double click, hold, drag in four directions, chord with a second button, or Hold & Swipe.
Mission Control, Spaces, ten window layouts, media keys, screenshots, close or quit under the pointer.
Any keystroke, launch an app, run a Shortcut, remap to another mouse button, or chain steps into a macro.
Limit a binding to certain apps, or exclude them.
Hold time, drag distance, swipe distance, reverse left/right per binding, and an optional live swipe transition.
The middle-click action, chosen per app, folder, file or Trash.
Export your settings to one file and import them on another Mac.
The hangar floor is loud. The Founder is louder. In 1955 Miss Pell, who answers most questions with a single number, stopped shouting across it and started signalling instead: a flat hand pushed up for lift, swept aside for next bay, pressed down for show me what's under it. The Skipwrights learned the signals in a week. The Founder never learned them, because nobody signals at him; they simply do what he said.
MacHancer's gestures are those signals, put on a mouse. Miss Pell's floor card is reproduced below for the record. The bottom half was torn off years ago. Nobody has asked who has it.
— for the record● is a press without moving. I and J share a square, as they always have on this floor.
Thirty-seven seconds, no narration. The Narrator was offered the job and declined; he said the windows speak for themselves.
Coming soon to the Mac App Store. The form has been stamped, filed and sent by pneumatic tube. It is in the tube now. Listen.
Coming soon to the Mac App StoreFor the two headline gestures, yes: Hold & Swipe is on Button 5 and tiling is on Button 4 by default. But any button or key can be bound to anything, so a three-button mouse can do plenty, and a plain wheel mouse still gets smooth scrolling. The Button Census above will count yours.
To see mouse and key events and act on them, and to move and resize windows. macOS asks you once, in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Accessibility. Nothing it sees is stored or sent anywhere; MacHancer makes no network connections.
Bindings work with any mouse buttons the Mac can see. Smooth scrolling only applies to wheel mice, since trackpads and Magic Mouse already scroll smoothly.
Only where you want it to. Out of the box, Buttons 4 and 5 do Back and Forward in Safari, which has never supported them on its own, and the gestures everywhere else. Every binding can be limited to some apps or kept out of others.
All of them. Every gesture is an ordinary binding you can edit, delete or replace, and changes apply at once. Export your settings to a file to keep them or move them to another Mac.
“You really think that little of me?”
MacHancer · a menu-bar app for macOS 14 or later · coming soon to the Mac App Store
