The middle click your Mac never had. Three-finger click or tap, fn+click, or Force Click — on the trackpad and the Magic Mouse.
What it does, what it costs, and every gesture it adds — the site explains it properly.
brew install artginzburg/tap/wheelclickOr 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.
Every Mac app that brings back the middle click, on the attributes people ask about first. Each cell was checked against that app's own materials on 31 August 2026 (MagicPrefs on 4 October, Jitouch on 9 October), and anything they don't state says so rather than guessing.
| Price | Free to keep | macOS | Magic Mouse | Autoscroll | Per-app rules | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WheelClick | $4.99 one-time, 14-day trial | Three-finger click and tap, forever | 13+ | Yes, in the direct build | Yes | Yes |
| MiddleClick | Free, GPL-3.0 | The whole app | 10.13+ | Yes | No | Ignore list |
| MiddleDrag | Free, MIT | The whole app | 15+ | No | Only where an app has its own | Not documented |
| Middle | Paid, 7-day trial | No | 10.15+ | Yes | Not documented | Not documented |
| MiddleTouch | $4.99 on the App Store, no trial | No | 10.15+ | No | Not documented | Not documented |
| Multitouch | $15.99, 30-day trial | No | 10.15+ | Yes | Not documented | Yes |
| BetterTouchTool | $15, or $25 lifetime, 45-day trial | No | Not documented | Yes | A basic action | Yes |
| MagicPrefs | £26 for 2 years, or £62 lifetime, 7-day trial | No | 15+ | Not documented | Not documented | No |
| Jitouch | Free, GPL-3.0; no release since January 2023 | The whole app | 10.13+ | Yes | Not documented | Yes |
The full table, with every row and a page per app on which one fits whom: wheelclick.app/vs/everything →
Is it free? Three-finger click and three-finger tap on the trackpad are free forever, with no account and no countdown. Everything else is a one-time $4.99 after a 14-day trial.
Does it work with a Magic Mouse? The version from wheelclick.app middle-clicks on the mouse's own surface. The App Store version cannot: reading a Magic Mouse's fingers needs access macOS grants only outside the App Store sandbox. fn+click works on any mouse in both. Why, in full →
App Store or direct? The same app, apart from the Magic Mouse gestures. An App Store purchase moves to the direct version for free: wheelclick.app/upgrade.
Does it fight macOS's Three Finger Drag? Not for the click: three-finger click and Three Finger Drag work at once, because WheelClick tells a physical click from the drag's synthesized one by the trackpad's own pressure reading.
What does it cost in battery? Measured, not estimated: at rest it draws 1/20 of what the menu bar clock does. How that was measured →
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 — the app's interface in 15 languages besides English. A wrong or awkward word in yours is a one-line pull request;
Localization/README.mdsays how.
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.mdis the method in full.
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.txtDrag 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 CFBundleShortVersionStringMissing — 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.
Homebrew's own cask index takes an app once its repository shows public interest: 75 stars or 30 watchers when someone other than the author submits it, 225 or 90 when the author does. WheelClick is well short of both today.
That is the entire difference between
brew install artginzburg/tap/wheelclick # today
brew install wheelclick # afterso if the app earned it, the Watch button is the most useful thing you can click here.
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 →