Turn your mouse side buttons into an app launcher on macOS

Look at your mouse. If it's anything other than an Apple Magic Mouse, there are probably two buttons on the left side near your thumb that you have never pressed on purpose. Button 4 and button 5. Most Mac users never map them to anything. macOS itself barely acknowledges they exist.

This is strange, because those buttons are arguably the best input you have available. Your right hand is already on the mouse. Your thumb is already resting next to them. Hitting one doesn't require any wrist movement, any keyboard reach, or any visual targeting. They're the most ergonomic unused input surface on your desk.

Gamers figured this out a decade ago. In almost every first-person shooter, button 4 is "melee" and button 5 is "grenade." You don't think about pressing them — your thumb just goes. That same muscle memory is sitting there, unused, every time you open Mail or switch to Slack.

Why macOS makes this harder than it should be

macOS recognizes mouse buttons 4 and 5 at the driver level, but exposes almost nothing to users directly. System Settings lets you change tracking and scroll direction. That's it. There's no native "map button 4 to Mission Control" anywhere in the OS.

The common workaround is to install driver software — SteerMouse, USB Overdrive, Logitech Options, Razer Synapse — and use it to translate mouse button 4 into a keystroke. Then you map that keystroke to something elsewhere, either with another app or with Automator. It works, but you've turned a physical button into a fake keypress into a real action, and every layer is a place where things silently break after a macOS update.

The better shape is to have the launcher itself treat mouse button 4 as a first-class trigger. You press and hold the button, the menu appears. You flick, you release, the action runs. No fake keystrokes in the middle.

Why side buttons pair well with a radial menu specifically

A global hotkey gives you one action per keystroke. If you want ten actions, you need ten hotkeys, which means ten combinations your hand has to remember and your fingers have to stretch for.

A single mouse button plus a radial menu gives you eight or twelve actions from the same press. The direction of the flick is the selector. Your thumb presses once; your wrist does the choosing. Nothing else moves.

This is also why it's genuinely one-handed. You can be eating a sandwich with your left hand. You can be holding a phone. You can be reading something on a second monitor. Your right hand does everything — browser tab, app switch, file open, mute call — without ever leaving the mouse.

A realistic one-handed layout

Here's what a working mouse-triggered profile looks like for someone who lives in a browser and a couple of communication apps:

Eight directions, two sub-menus, about fourteen actions total. All driven from one button on the left side of the mouse. After a week, your thumb learns which direction is which, and you stop looking at the menu at all — you just flick through it.

Setting it up in Swik

In Swik, mouse button triggers are a first-class option alongside keyboard hotkeys. The setup is:

1. Open Swik's settings and go to the Trigger section.
2. Set trigger to Mouse Button and choose button 4 or 5 (Swik will show you which button your mouse is reporting).
3. Pick hold-and-release behavior. This is what makes the menu feel instant — you hold the button, the menu appears, you flick and release.
4. Assign actions to wedges the same way you would for any other profile.

Mouse button triggers are Pro in Swik, because they're the feature that turns this from "launcher I use sometimes" into "launcher I use constantly." Keyboard hotkey triggers are in the free tier, so you can try the menu shape before committing to the mouse-button workflow.

A few things to know

Your mouse has to actually report the buttons to macOS. Most Logitech, Razer, Microsoft, Keychron, and generic USB mice do. The Apple Magic Mouse does not have side buttons at all. Some mice ship in a mode where their side buttons do nothing until you install the vendor's driver — if you're on a Logitech MX Master, installing Logi Options+ once is usually enough to make the buttons visible to every app, then you can uninstall the custom mappings inside Options+ and let Swik take over.

Check with a button-test page first. If Swik doesn't pick up the button press, open any online mouse button tester in a browser and click button 4. If the test page sees it, Swik will see it. If the test page doesn't, the mouse is swallowing it at the hardware level and you need the vendor driver running in pass-through mode.

Don't map both side buttons to the same trigger. A common reflex is to bind button 4 and button 5 to the same menu so either thumb position works. Don't. Use button 4 for your primary profile and button 5 for a secondary profile — for example, button 4 for apps and actions, button 5 for your Shortcuts library. You get double the reach with no extra muscle memory.

It survives sleep and reboots. Unlike some driver-based remappings, which need the vendor app launched and logged in before they take effect, Swik binds to the button at the HID level and is ready the moment you log in.