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Don't know if this is possible with any flavor of Windows, Mac or Linux OS, but sometimes I wish I could attach two mice to my laptop. I often have a bunch of Finder windows open on one screen (external monitor) while working on coding and previewing my app in another screen. But to move the mouse all the way over from one screen to the other screen to open a file, then move the mouse all the way back to the screen where I've got my editor open to get back to coding. It wastes movement and precious time before my daily wrist fatigue sets in. It'd be great if I could add another mouse with an independent mouse pointer. Or even better ... a specialized mouse could be equipped with a simple toggle switch to alternately switch focus between two mouse pointers. This would allow the user to quickly navigate between two screen.

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Short of writing a customized device driver that would restrict each mouse to a subset of coordinates... this is probably not easy to do at a system level. Without special configuration, mouse events get posted to a common Console Mouse device.

What might be an easier solution is to develop a tray or toolbar application that does something like:
  • Trap a System-Wide Hot-Key, and warp the mouse (programmatically reset the Mouse X/Y Coordinates) to pre-determined "hot spots" that you'd be able to configure.
  • Use a Mouse-Over event to likewise warp the mouse to pre-determined hot-spots. I've seen some apps use an animated Whirlpool graphic when doing this; but the use context was usually to switch Virtual Desktops.
I do use a trackball!

Brian Russo said:
Another idea is to switch to a trackball; I don't use them but had a colleague who had wrist issues and swore by them.

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