Razer Left Me Wanting

As I've likely prattled on about before, I use a mouse left-handed. I am not actually left-handed, at least when it comes to handwriting and most of my artistic ventures. The art I make on my computer benefits from a mouse over a pen tablet since the number pad does most of the work whenever the slower, precise movements of a mouse are not adequate. Most legit lefties I know have cruelly forced themselves to simply use their mouse right-handedly, especially when they're at work, and especially at work if someone got it in their head that everyone should have a so-called ergonomic mouse. Fortunately, most of the mice at my work are as ambidextrous as they are basic. 

As much as I don't mind keyboard shortcuts, having some of those shortcuts on the same hand as my mouse is extremely convenient. Perhaps it's from years of console gaming wherein all your important moves are managed by your thumbs rather than your fingertips. Before the Apple Pencil, my favorite stylus for my iPad was from Adonit, and it had two little shortcut keys near the tip. I mapped my un/redo keys to these two buttons and I got so used to it that when I used a real pencil and needed to erase, I instinctively squeezed the end I was holding. As for the mice I've had, there have been many, and I'll spare you the long, drawn-out narrative and get to the point by showing you the mouse I'm currently using at home:

No words. Should have sent a poet.

I like the Maus. I love the styling, it's got a good heft and weight to it, and the wireless has never been a hindrance to me. My only real gripe about it is it's a little small. This is hardly a dealbreaker as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your palm on your mouse anyway. Your forearm should be parallel to your desk and you shouldn't drag your arm on the surface, just as you shouldn't necessarily be resting your wrists in front of the keyboard. When the workaround is getting rid of a bad habit, I can let some things go. Given that, there is another gripe that's a little harder to ignore. It's that little silver button below the scroll wheel. It controls the DPI. 

If you don't know, DPI stands for Dots Per Inch and it refers to the sensitivity of the mouse, how fast you can move your cursor across the screen. The higher the DPI the faster and farther the arrow flies across the screen with less movement of the mouse itself. Most of you probably never bother with this, especially if the computer isn't technically yours (even if it is yours in the sense that you use it regularly and are expected to be productive with it). Some of you probably know you can adjust this sensitivity setting in the control panel, especially if some jerk who used your computer before for some reason needed the sensitivity way down so you'd have to practically sweep everything off your desk just to move your cursor halfway across the screen (or picking it up and putting it back down over and over, feeling a little more ridiculous each time you repeat the motion). 

By the way, that so-called "natural" option for scroll direction can kiss my ass.

Some mouse makers have decided burying this slider in a menu not many people bother with until something goes wrong and solved the "problem" by allowing you to adjust the sensitivity of your mouse on the device itself. It makes sense, but I've always wondered why the button to do so is typically below the scroll wheel and tilted towards the wheel (as it's following the slope of the mouse's shape) to make accidentally clicking on it virtually inevitable. The Maus compounds this problem by giving you the option of about a half-dozen different DPI settings, at least four of which seem to be for people who move their mice by gently breathing on them. Maybe on a 4K monitor it evens itself out, more pixels on screen means a higher DPI is needed to cover the same distance. 

There is a genius alternative to this that I hope more mouse makers catch on to. It's called a clutch. The idea is that your mouse is set to a higher DPI to let you navigate the screen faster. When you need to slow down to make more precise and controlled movements, you push a small button on the mouse to bring the DPI down to its lowest possible setting. When you need to go fast again, simply release the clutch. 

It's currently on the Razer Basilisk and the Logitech G502, both of which are ergonomic mice with no left-handed option. In fact, Razer used to be rather friendly to the lefty crowd, with left-handed versions of some of their most well-regarded mice, including the Death Adder and especially the Naga. The Naga has a full 12-button keypad for the thumb, which may sound crowded, but is fairly navigable. I had one of these mice for a long time and it served me well. I speak of it in the past tense because the middle click gave out. Despite their internal switches being rated to some insane number of presses, the one under my scroll wheel missed that QA inspection. 

Fortunately, Razer has a pretty generous support and warranty policy. Unfortunately, that doesn't guarantee they'll be able to replace or repair everything in their product range. As the left-handed Naga was no longer made, they offered me a short list of mice to replace it with, which were all right-handed ergonomic mice, including the Death Adder, whose lefty counterpart had also been axed recently. 

How's about HELL NO!?

Further mucking things up was the oversight of these many alternatives being out of stock. The silver lining to all of this was that I could opt to take a store credit and wait for a mouse they had coming out called the Viper. I could conceivably have gone for a cheaper mouse that was ambidextrous, but that would have left me with almost half of the store credit left over and nothing to use it on besides maybe a really nice mat. The choice before me then was either to take a gamble on this new mouse, or remap the middle click of the Naga to one of its many programmable buttons and therefore throw off my entire workflow (as I would have proper middle click on every other mouse I'd use). I chose the former option. 

Have I ever mentioned how much I love braided cables?

The Viper has been good, but it is so very just shy of perfect it almost brings the whole thing down. For what it costs and what it offers as a mouse, it's overpriced compared to other offerings in the catalog. Given it cost the same as my Naga did when it was new, it really felt like a downgrade. However, as I didn't have much of a choice what with being given store credit and all, I figured its size would be its saving grace, being near enough to the Naga that I wouldn't have to reorient myself with its feel. It gets a lot of other things right; it's got the braided cable, the DPI switch is out of the way (on the bottom of the mouse, in a small recess that you need a pen to push), and it is truly and legitimately ambidextrous. 

While it doesn't have the full 12 keys of a Naga, it's got two shortcut buttons on either side of it. Assigning my two most common shortcuts to them has, for all intents and purposes, made up for it not being a Naga. What it doesn't make up for is Razer's slow crawl towards a right-handed catalog. There's also the weight, which is my biggest complaint about it. For its price, the Viper feels cheap, almost fragile. I'm almost convinced the cord weighs more as sometimes the cord slipping off the back of my desk will pull the mouse down with it. It hasn't sent it tumbling into the narrow chasm between the desk and the wall, and I doubt it would, but I don't get why this mouse needs to be this lightweight. 

Computer mice occupy an amusing space of product design. Once upon a time, the computer mouse had to be the size and shape it was to accommodate a rubber-coated metal ball. Too big and the mouse would be hard to move. Too small and the ball would just as soon slide on a surface as roll. More importantly, the mouse had to house the mechanism needed to make sense of the ball's movements, little roller pins and optical sensors reading off tiny slotted flywheels. Later on, the optical sensor took center stage and could read off the surface directly. This meant the pins and flywheels had to be replaced with a few more chips and other components because it had to do more processing power to make sense of what it was seeing. As time went on, those components became smaller and smaller, with less hardware needed overall for the sensor to make sense of where it was on your desk. This made for a fair bit of empty space inside the mouse. 

One of the most audacious uses of that empty space was an arrangement of slots for metal weights. Weighing down a mouse seems like a weird thing to do, but just like the DPI adjustments, sometimes you need to be able to move your mouse in a fairly controlled and precise manner. A high DPI combined with a weighty mouse gives the best of both worlds. 

So you now understand the weight of the situation.

The Viper definitely has the empty space for such weights, but the only way I'm going to get that is the DIY route, and I'm not about to start drilling holes and prying stickers and panels off of an 80USD mouse (that's also what the G502 costs, weights included). 

Luckily, I've found a few alternatives outside of the Razer catalog such as Steelseries and Corsair. They don't have weight options, but they are notably heftier than the Viper along with sharing a similar form factor. That includes those shortcut buttons on either side of the casing. To be fair to Razer, since its release, the Viper's price has come down a little. It's still not low enough for me to begin exploratory surgery, but I don't hold the price point against them anymore. Last week, I was looking through their site to get some specs for a LinkedIN post I'm writing covering this topic in a little more work-related depth. I saw they offered two new versions of the Viper, one wireless, and one labeled "mini." I thought all my problems were solved. Wireless mice make use of that empty space by storing a battery. The battery adds weight, and I've got hefty where wimpy once was. However, Razer, in their wisdom, found a way to make the wireless Viper weigh virtually the same as the wired version. That's okay, I thought, I've got an option. Yes, the mini is smaller, but it's also about half the price, well within the territory of being modified with no real blow to the bottom line. 

Then I got a better look at it. 

Can't see the problem? That's okay. I didn't spot it right away, either. 

... 

... Razer? I want you to look at me. I want to ask you a question and I want you to think long and hard about your answer before you tell it to me. I want you to think about all that I've said about the past designs of your products which I have praised you for. Okay, here we go:

How can it be an ambidextrous mouse when the shortcut keys ARE ONLY ON ONE SIDE!?

It's the LITTLE things....

Look, I get that making left-handed versions of your ergonomic mice isn't ideal for you. There simply are not enough left-handed mouse users to justify production on that scale. 

By the way, LoFree isn't off the hook either.

Define symmetry for me, please.

In their defense, the place on the right-hand side where some shortcut keys would be nice is taken up by an adorable little storage compartment for the wireless dongle as well as the charging port. As I said, I do like the Maus, but I prefer it as a portable accessory for my iPad when I need to use a mouse with it. The same goes for the keyboard I've got at home right now. It's fine enough for the Mac mini, but it's better suited to accompany a tablet. 

A wise one once said that art is never finished, only abandoned. I suppose I've got the same philosophy with my workspace, a constant work in progress. That reminds me, I have to get back to designing my new desk.