How to Remap Your Mouse Buttons for a Productivity Boost in Photoshop, Excel, and VS Code

Photoshop

Photoshop sessions are long and mouse-heavy. You're selecting, painting, transforming, and layering, all while bouncing to the keyboard for tool switches, undo, and selection commands. Individually, each keyboard shortcut is quick. But across a 2-hour retouching session, hundreds of small interruptions add up to real lost time.

The most effective approach is to group related actions by button. One button for edit operations (undo, redo, deselect), one for tools you swap between constantly, and one for file and view management.

Back Side Button: Editing

Forward Side Button: Tools

Middle Scroll Button: File & View

Grouping by category makes the cadences easier to remember. You don't have to think about whether undo is on your back button or forward button because all editing operations live on the same thumb. Tool switching is the other thumb. File management is the scroll wheel. After a few sessions, the muscle memory locks in and you stop thinking about which cadence does what.

The middle button hold disables MouseKey entirely, which matters because Photoshop uses middle click for canvas panning. When you need to pan, hold to disable, move your canvas, then re-enable from the MouseKey window. Frequent saves on single click middle are also valuable because Photoshop files are large and a crash without a recent save can cost real work.

If you also use Illustrator or InDesign, most of these shortcuts carry over since Adobe apps share keybinds. You could use the same profile for the full Creative Cloud suite or create separate profiles with minor tweaks per app.

Excel

Excel is a different kind of mouse-heavy. You're selecting ranges, scrolling through rows, clicking between sheets, and formatting cells. The shortcuts that save the most time aren't dramatic individually, but you do them so often that shaving a second off each one makes a real difference across a full spreadsheet session.

Back Side Button: Clipboard

Forward Side Button: Formatting & Rows

Middle Scroll Button: Navigation & Utility

The biggest time saver in this layout is having both Paste and Paste Values on separate buttons. Regular paste on forward single click, clean paste (values only, no formatting) on back triple click. If you've ever pasted data from one workbook into another and spent the next 30 seconds undoing the formatting mess it created, Paste Values on a dedicated cadence eliminates that completely.

Copy on back single click and paste on forward single click creates a natural flow: select cells, thumb-click to copy, navigate to the destination, other-thumb-click to paste. It mirrors the left-to-right motion your hands naturally make.

Sheet navigation on the middle button replaces clicking the tiny tabs at the bottom of the screen. If you're working through a multi-tab financial model, flipping between sheets with scroll wheel double and triple clicks is faster and less precise-click-intensive than hunting for tab labels.

This layout also works in Google Sheets since the keyboard shortcuts are nearly identical. One MouseKey profile covers both apps.

VS Code

The biggest productivity gain in VS Code isn't remapping keyboard shortcuts. It's putting typed strings on your mouse buttons. MouseKey can type out any text string when you click a button, which means commands you type dozens of times a day can fire instantly from a single cadence.

Think about how many times you type npm run dev, git status, git add ., or console.log() in a session. Each one takes a few seconds to type. With MouseKey, you record the string once and assign it to a cadence. One click and the full command appears in your terminal or editor.

Back Side Button: Typed Commands

Forward Side Button: Editor Actions

Middle Scroll Button: Code Editing

The back button is entirely typed strings and commands. This is where MouseKey differs most from traditional shortcut remapping tools. You're not just moving a keyboard shortcut to a mouse button. You're replacing something that takes 3 to 5 seconds of typing with a single click. Over a full coding day, that's significant.

You can customize these strings to your own stack. If you work in Python, swap npm run dev for python manage.py runserver. If you're in a monorepo, add your specific build commands. MouseKey records the exact keystrokes including Enter, Tab, and arrow keys, so you can build multi-step sequences that navigate menus, fill in boilerplate, or chain terminal commands.

The forward button handles the VS Code UI actions you reach for between typing. Toggle Terminal on single click is the most impactful since developers switch between editor and terminal constantly. Quick Open File and Command Palette on the same button give you fast access to VS Code's two most powerful search features.

Comment Line and Move Line on the middle button are small but frequent editing operations. Alt+Up to move a line is an awkward two-hand reach on the keyboard, but a triple click on the scroll wheel is effortless.

If you use other editors like JetBrains IDEs or Sublime Text, the typed strings work identically since they're just keystrokes. The shortcut cadences might need adjusting for different keybinds, but the string commands are universal.