Budget mouse and Hot Corners in macOS High Sierra are a match made in heaven—here's why

In my blog post about why I upgraded to Logitech MX Anywhere 2S, I’ve been using the cheaper budget mouse, the M221, for about a year. It’s a nicely designed little mouse capable of withstanding long, full-day use without hurting my wrists.

Sporting only three buttons, at a glance, the M221's features may seem to be so limited it's almost like a minimalist’s paradise. But if you know how to work around this limitation, as you can see in the next paragraph, you can actually do much, much more with it.

Enter Hot Corners

When I first learned about Hot Corners, I stupidly shrugged it off. Why would I ever use it when I have a superior multi-touch trackpad that can do much more? Oh, younger me, you don’t know just how wrong you are!

What Hot Corners basically is, is that it allows you to configure the four corners in your Mac screen as “hot spots” so that whenever your cursor hits them, it triggers a certain action such as start screensaver, launch Mission Control, show desktop, and more.

Here’s how you can configure Hot Corners on macOS High Sierra.

1. Launch System Preferences
2. Navigate to Mission Control
3. Click the Hot Corners button on the bottom left
4. Alternatively you can just press Command+Space to launch Spotlight and type in Hot Corners.

From the menu that appears, you can set up the actions that Hot Corners will trigger. Here’s how I have it set up.

(I leave the top two corners empty because I don’t want to accidentally trigger Hot Corners when I glide towards the Apple logo on the top left or Notification Center on the top right.)

This way, the mouse mimics a little of what the MacBook Air trackpad can do without me having to glide back and forth between my mouse and trackpad.

Say I’m reading a website in Safari. When I find an interesting quote from it, I can copy it, glide my cursor towards the bottom right corner of the screen to launch Mission Control, and then paste it on Bear. Or when I want to launch an app, I can do the same at the bottom left corner of the screen. All of this are done without moving my hand away from the mouse and thus interrupting my workflow.

Bonus tip: Magic trick using the middle click

An immensely useful feature that I think all budget mouse has built-in is a feature that can be very easily overlooked: the middle click. In a web browser, for example, the middle click lets you open a link in a new tab or closing a tab. Best of all, this trick works out of the box, saving you from the complications of a set-up process. Lifehacker has comprehensively written about the many uses of middle click and I recommend you check it out.

The middle click magic in action.

Albert Einstein once said, “Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them.” Who knows that the same principle can also be applied to a budget mouse! A cheap mouse can do much more than you thought it can if you know how take full advantage of it.

I hope you find this post useful!