Left handed pointing stick, right handed mouse

I've got a new ThinkPad X1 with the pointing stick, which I much prefer over the touchpad for road use.

I'm left handed and prefer to hit the right side button with my left thumb. So I went into the Win 11 settings and reversed the mouse buttons. Right side button is the primary, left side for context menus and such. Yup, that works. But...

When I'm at home, I use an external mouse with my right hand and (you guessed it) want the primary button to be the left side one.

On my old Win 7 Tecra, I could set them separately, stick buttons reversed and mouse buttons as normal. So far, I haven't been able to find/figure out how to do that on the Lenovo. No joy from Google, either.

Ideas, anyone?

To do this, you can use reg keys: Change Primary Mouse Button in Windows 11 Tutorial

Download both, put them on your desktop and then whenever you want to change just click whichever you desire to change to.

James said:

To do this, you can use reg keys: Change Primary Mouse Button in Windows 11 Tutorial

Download both, put them on your desktop and then whenever you want to change just click whichever you desire to change to.

Click to expand...

The registry solution appears to be the same as doing them in settings. That gives the same behavior to both. I want them set up separately, the way I was able to do it on my old Tecra. Stick reversed, mouse conventional, all the time.

Buddy said:

The registry solution appears to be the same as doing them in settings. That gives the same behavior to both. I want them set up separately, the way I was able to do it on my old Tecra. Stick reversed, mouse conventional, all the time.

Click to expand...

As far as I am aware there is no way of doing this. What I am saying you can do is put both registry keys on the desktop or taskbar and then whenever you switch input devices double click the registry applicable.

SO for you pointing stick, you would click the left to right, and then when you go back to the normal mouse you click right to left.

What a pain that they 'removed' this feature. Unless it's somewhere we don't know about

James said:

What a pain that they 'removed' this feature. Unless it's somewhere we don't know about

Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply, James.

It was so long ago that I set it up on the Tecra and I can't remember how I did it. Looking at the settings on it, there's not an obvious place for the mouse vs. the pointing stick. I thought it might be in some Logitech software, but the software for my new mouse is just a different path to the generic system setting. Tried it and it just changed both.

Hoping maybe someone either knows a Windows solution or something in shareware. Yeah, I know, seems unlikely. Oh, well...

Buddy said:

Hoping maybe someone either knows a Windows solution or something in shareware. Yeah, I know, seems unlikely. Oh, well...

Click to expand...

I just found a program, which can do the trick easily for you (and for me). Best of all, it is FREE!

X-Mouse Button Control

This isn't the purpose of this app, but it is easy to configure it to switch between different mouses. You can't do it automatically, but you can switch between them with a single click or assign hotkeys to do the same.
I just set the Primary mouse button to Left in Windows mouse setting and used X-mouse to configure the switching left and right-handed mouses.
In X-Mouse I use the two default Layers only.
In Layer 1 I have changed Left button to perform Right click, and the Right button to perform Left click. You can also change the Layer name to "LEFT HANDED MOUSE" if you wish:



In Layer 2 I just changed the Layer name to "RIGHT HANDED MOUSE".



In the Setting I turned on Cycle layers by left clicking tray icon:

Then assigned Hotkeys to Layer 1 and Layer 2:


You must close the Global setting windows AND X-Mouse window to be able to use the hotkeys!

This is it. Now you can switch between your left- and right-handed mouse by clicking the X-Mouse tray icon or by using the hotkeys.

I hope it helps.