How a Gaming Mouse Can Make You a More Efficient Designer
A gaming mouse is not just for gaming

I have been using what I call a “nerd mouse” for all things design since 2015. I first came across the idea of using a gaming mouse for design while playing League of Legends, a popular multiplayer online game. This particular game favors players who can assess a situation and quickly react by tapping a number of different keys on a keyboard. I found myself having a hard time reaching some of these keys; my pinky felt limp, my ring finger couldn’t stretch and contort to hit the number keys, and I knew I was over-relying on my index finger to get the job done.
The purchase of this gaming mouse changed everything about my efficiency as a designer.
It finally occurred to me I could purchase a mouse designed for MOBA games. At last, I was able to take advantage of all of my fingers on my right hand, while simultaneously distributing work evenly across both my hands. I immediately noticed a difference; a difference I soon applied to all of my work, not just video games.
The purchase of this gaming mouse changed everything about my efficiency as a designer. Before long, I was obsessively binding shortcut keys to mouse buttons, scroll wheels and more. In Sketch, this meant a couple of things. For one, I could use my scroll wheel to zoom. I also had about 20 other buttons on my mouse at my disposal that I could map to my most used functions; like, “Set Symbol to Original Size,” “Hide/Show Layout,” “Return to Parent Artboard,” and many more. Before long, I was using both my left hand and my right hand evenly, constantly punching in hotkeys and shaving hours off of my work.
Getting to this point wasn’t particularly hard either. I ran into a few roadblocks early on that I was able to quickly resolve with the right software. One of these roadblocks was finding the right program that would allow me to override the buttons on my mouse to whatever I wanted. From there, I needed another piece of software that would set those newly bounded buttons to actual commands or a string of shortcut keys called a macro.
Before long, all of the tedious design work I was doing in Sketch became automated overnight, which gave me more time to iterate and be creative.
For the first roadblock, I downloaded the software that came with my mouse provider (i.e. Razer Synapse). This piece of software is honestly pretty crap, especially on MacOS, but it does get the job done as it allows you to remap the default buttons to new keys, such as F1, F2, or whatever keys you want. Alternatively, you could skip this step and instead download a more advanced program called Karabiner Elements, which listens to device inputs (such as those from a mouse) and allows you to change the mapping from the key inputted to whatever you want, even to a virtual key or key that is not on your keyboard such as something generic like “Button 12.” This is the route I ended up taking in the end.
Finally, I downloaded BetterTouchTool, software that specializes in creating and manipulating keyboard shortcuts for any application. It even allows you to access menu bar items or dialog boxes from any application and assign a shortcut key to them. From there, all of my generic mouse buttons 1–20 got mapped to shortcut keys or macros (a recording of various shortcut keys in chronological order). Before long, all of the tedious design work I was doing in Sketch became automated overnight, which gave me more time to iterate and be creative.
Including both my keyboard and mouse, I now have somewhere around 30 to 40 shortcut keys I use on a regular basis just for Sketch alone. They are tailored to my specific workflow, which ends up saving me hours of work in the end.
If you want to take this concept of “hyper-efficiency” even further, I have two more game-changing enhancements that I plan on sharing in a separate post, so be on the lookout for that!
Items mentioned in the article (no affiliate links):
- Razer Naga Trinity (Gaming mouse I use, you definitely get it cheaper on Amazon so look there)
- Razer Synapse
- Karabiner Elements
- BetterTouchTool
Other Mice I have used that work well too:
The opinions expressed in this story are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect those of Yext.
