Emulate wheel with single-button apple mouse

Recently, I reactivated my good old apple mouse. I really love its timeless design and the simplicity of the single button. Yes, there is no second button for right clicks. But no, I’m no brainless apple fanatic.

Instead of the buttons there is this brilliant design of utilizing keyboard modifiers, such as control, command or option, in order to extend the functionality of a single key. We are used to this feature for a long time, using command + s to save data or command +q to quit an application. So why not using it for mouse buttons? To me it is consistent to use the same idea for additional mouse buttons. And this is what makes good design, at least to me.

But what about the mouse wheel? My good old mouse does not have a wheel. :-/

Well, what about changing the key map such that the movement of the mouse is mapped to the wheel function if I additionally press left command. Fortunately, karabiner allows to change the key map of Os X. So I added the following code to the XML configuration (private.xml):

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
<item>
  <name>Single button mouse wheel</name
  <identifier>private.single_button_mouse_wheel</identifier>
  <autogen>__PointingRelativeToScroll__ PointingButton::NONE, ModifierFlag::COMMAND_L</autogen>
  </item>
</root>

And now I can use my nice looking apple mouse for today’s standard pointer functions.