What is the point of a 3-button Amiga mouse?

[Franko]

You will learn to control yourself extremely well this way. This is also in pair with the philosophy of Guru meditation. For example coding in assembler - one wrong poke and the Guru comes to visit you.

Nah... it don't help if you've got a nervous twitch or Parkinson's disease...

PS: Erm.. you don't use "pokes" when coding in assembler on the Amiga so the Guru should never pop by for tea & scones...

[pVC]

I don't probably even remember all the functionality I've included with middle mousebutton on my A1200 (as I don't use it as my main machine anymore), but I'll try to remember few

The most important thing is that it is used to scroll areas in MUI. Scrolling web pages, big images etc in _any_ direction while MMB is pressed is very handy.

I also assigned shift key to MMB and it made scrolling in previous cases perfectly fast

In-line renaming in Magellan is good with MMB. Also button banks have one more option to click them.

I also used double MMB to bring windows to front (then they won't pop up witout intention like with double LMB could happen).

Then I used MMB+RMB to switch to next screen and MMB+LMB to switch to previous screen.

All these have worked fine together without overriding others. MCP is good to assign some of those features...

[muahaha]

All that bit above + the third button keeps his belly from showing. It's called a belly button.

[Minuous]

Some software does use it, eg. I think Worm Wars and AmiArcadia do something useful with it IIRC.

Personally I have the MMB set up to simulate doubleclicking the LMB, in both AmigaOS and Windows. It makes those OSes much more ergonomic. Doubleclicking is one of the most poorly thought out UI elements, whoever came up with the idea should be shot. Probably some lamer from Apple or Xerox.

[amigadave]

All that bit above + the third button keeps his belly from showing. It's called a belly button.

Interesting first post here at Amiga.org?

Welcome and I hope you will introduce yourself and tell us something about your use and knowledge of Amiga computers.

[amigadave]

Third mouse button can be very useful if you want to clear your RAM DISK: fast. Map it to reset the machine every time you press the button and it will clear the memory as well.
Just be careful to not press the middle button when you have unsaved work.

I usually don't agree with Franko on most issues, but I have to agree that using a click of the MMB to reset your Amiga for the purpose of clearing the RAM disk has got to be one of the strangest uses I have ever read about, compared to the many other uses of the MMB listed by others in this thread.