WheelClick

The middle click your Mac never had. Three-finger click or tap, fn+click, or Force Click — on the trackpad and the Magic Mouse.

→ wheelclick.app

What it does, what it costs, and every gesture it adds — the site explains it properly.

---

Install

brew install artginzburg/tap/wheelclick

Or download the .dmg — notarized, signed, and the same build.

Three-finger click and three-finger tap are free forever, with no account and no countdown. A license unlocks what WheelClick adds on top: fn+click, Force Click, the Magic Mouse gestures, middle-drag for CAD, autoscroll and per-app rules.

What's here — and what isn't

WheelClick's source is closed, so there is no app code in this repository. What lives here is everything that benefits from being public:

• Releases — every version, signed and notarized. The Homebrew cask installs from here.
• Issues — bugs, read by the person who writes the app.
• Discussions — the gestures you wish existed, and anything you're trying to work out.
• Localizations, once there are any to keep.

Closed app, open parts

When a piece of WheelClick turns out to be useful beyond WheelClick, it gets extracted and open-sourced instead of staying buried in the app:

• Tiptoe — the Swift package WheelClick updates itself through. It holds an update until the Mac is quiet, then installs it with no UI — over Sparkle or GitHub Releases. MIT, ready for your app too.
• perf/ — the energy harness. Every figure on the energy rating page came out of these scripts, and they are here so that a number you are asked to believe can be checked against the thing that produced it. The harness is welded to the app's own source, so it is something to read rather than to run on your own app — perf/README.md is the method in full.

Something broken, or missing?

Broken — open an issue. Please say which macOS version and which Mac; trackpad behavior differs more between models than it has any right to. If the app crashed, or misbehaves in a way that is hard to describe, the two attachments below turn a report into something fixable.

If the app crashed — attach the crash reports

macOS already wrote one for every crash. Paste this into Terminal: it collects the ten most recent crash reports from WheelClick and its touch helper, zips them (GitHub does not accept a bare .ips) and opens Finder with the zip already selected, ready to drag into the issue.

rm -f ~/Desktop/wheelclick-crashes.zip
find ~/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports -maxdepth 2 -name 'WheelClick*.ips' -print0 2>/dev/null | xargs -0 ls -t 2>/dev/null | head -10 | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 zip -qj ~/Desktop/wheelclick-crashes.zip 2>/dev/null
[ -f ~/Desktop/wheelclick-crashes.zip ] && open -R ~/Desktop/wheelclick-crashes.zip || echo "No WheelClick crash report on this Mac."

Each report is plain text naming the exact line the app died on, which is usually the whole fix. Several of them are better than one: a crash that repeats looks different from a crash that happened once, and the app and its helper write separate reports when they go down together.

If it misbehaves without crashing — attach a log

The app's own log is never written to disk, so it has to be captured live. Paste this whole block into Terminal at once: it starts recording, gives you a minute to reproduce the problem, then stops and opens Finder with the file selected.

/usr/bin/log stream --level debug --predicate 'subsystem BEGINSWITH "art.ginzburg.WheelClick"' > ~/Desktop/wheelclick-log.txt &
echo "Reproduce the problem now — recording for 60 seconds…"
sleep 60
kill $!
open -R ~/Desktop/wheelclick-log.txt

Drag wheelclick-log.txt from the Finder window into the issue. It contains only WheelClick's own lines: which gesture was recognized, on which device, and what it did. No keystrokes, no window titles, no text you typed.

Also useful, in any report:

sw_vers && defaults read /Applications/WheelClick.app/Contents/Info CFBundleShortVersionString

Missing — start a discussion: Ideas for a gesture or a feature you want, Q&A for anything you're trying to figure out. Requests live there rather than in Issues so that an open issue always means something is actually wrong.

Watching this repo does something concrete

Homebrew's own cask index accepts a third-party app once its repository clears 75 stars or 30 watchers. WheelClick has one of each today.

That is the entire difference between

brew install artginzburg/tap/wheelclick    # today
brew install wheelclick                    # after

so if the app earned it, the Watch button is the most useful thing you can click here.

Coming from MiddleClick?

WheelClick is its successor, by the same author — and the middle click MiddleClick gave you, three-finger click and three-finger tap, is free in WheelClick permanently. MiddleClick itself stays where it is: free, GPL-3.0, still on Homebrew, nothing removed.

The full version of that, in writing and dated: what stays free →