Review: Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 (and how to make it work in Ubuntu)
ergonomic evoluent HowTo linux mouse mouse buttons review ubuntu · 21 comments · 1,450 words · read ~25,946 times.
New! Read my 2018 guide to setting up the Evoluent in Linux
The Evoluent Vertical Mouse 4 costs close to £100
Let me explain...
"The two things you've got to spend your money on in life are your bed and your shoes; if you're not in one, you're in the other." Ancient proverb
I have been prone to RSI in my hands and wrists. Seeing as I make my living using my hands to make computers do magical things, I think it's wise to spend money to protect my hands.
"The two peripherals you've got to spend your money on in life are your keyboard and your mouse; if your hands aren't on one, they're on the other." Terence Eden
I may detail my love of my keyboard - the Microsoft 4000 - in another post. For now, let's talk mice! 
Or, skip straight to the Linux install instructions.
Three Generations of Mice
I'm in love with the Evoluent Vertical Mouse. I got my first (the generation 2) in 2007. A few years later I got a 3rd generation so I could use one at home and one at work. Enter the 4th generation - the VM4R. There's a VM4L for those sinister south-paws, and a VM4S for those with smaller hands.
Here's all three of my mice playing together. 
The VM4R is similar in size and shape to the previous versions. 
It has a wider base and a larger lip to stop your finger from dragging along the desk.
Unboxing
No tech review is complete without an unboxing. Here's mine.
Impressively, Evoluent use "environmentally-responsible" packaging. Essentially a cardboard box and some bubble wrap. I was nervous that this wouldn't be enough to protect it in transit - but the mouse is pretty tough. The box contains some brief instructions and a mini-cd containing Windows drivers.
The Good
There's just so much to love about this mouse! I'll contain myself to a few points.
Vertical = Less Pain
Pain and comfort are subjective. But since using the Vertical Mouse range, my wrists have been free of pain. There are a vast number of reviews on the Evoluent website, including this one:
"The vertical mouse received very good feedback from the product testing. Our product testing team of physical therapists, ergonomists, MD's and administrators found the mouse to be comfortable, easily adaptable and promoted a neutral wrist/forearm postures." Greg Ryan, University Health Services, University of California at Berkeley
I can't say that this will fix your health problems - and you should certainly see a doctor immediately if you're experiencing RSI - but this device has bought back the joy of computing for me.
Thumb Buttons
My index finger is near worn out from 3 decades of clicking crappy mice. I'm now able to map the buttons so that my thumb can click. A lifesaver for me. As a bonus - anyone who sits at my desk finds themselves unable to fiddle with anything because they can't work out how to click!
The VM4R now comes with two thumb buttons. I'm not sure what use I'll put the other one to yet!
The Need For Speed
The VM4R comes with a dedicated button for switching the speed of the mouse pointer. 
A simple click sets the speed which can easily be seen via the LEDs. 
This is a vast improvement on the 3rd gen model where the button was underneath the device. 
The advantage is that you can use a high-speed mouse so you don't have to move your wrist or arm very far as you go from one end of the screen to the other. It also means you can rapidly change to a lower sensitivity when you're working on something which needs very fine grained control - like pushing pixels in Photoshop. I imagine this mouse is great for gamers who require a fast reacting device.
The Bad
There's very little that I would change with this mouse. I note three minor quibbles.
Scroll Wheel Clicking
Scrolling with the wheel makes a really loud clicking sound. With the 2nd generation mouse there was no clicking. The third generation lightly clicks as you scroll. The clicking on the VM4R is loud and, to my fingers, slightly stiff. 
Personally, I prefer a free-spinning wheel. But it's not the end of the world.
Suitability of Chrome
Fingers sweat. It's not pretty, but there it is. Human skin leaks all kinds of gunk - some of which is corrosive. I found the surface of my 2nd generation mouse was gently worn away over time. 
The 3rd gen mouse is made from a different material which doesn't seem to suffer from this problem.
The chrome on the VM4R looks lovely - but I wonder how long it will remain pristine. It's already picking up fingerprints. 
LED
There's no way to turn off the glowing Evoluent LED. I doubt it's much of a power drain, but it's the sort of thing that might get a bit annoying in the dark. 
...and The Beautiful
It looks like a spaceship!
This is a gorgeous mouse. The lights, the chrome, the shape, all conspire to make it an eye-catcher. Expect to get lots of questions about it if you're in a busy office.
Buy It Now
I have absolutely no hesitation in recommending the Evoluent line of pointing devices. You can buy the Evoluent VM4R from Amazon
Linux Geekyness
The basic mouse functions work automagically in Linux (tested on Ubuntu 9.10 and higher). The buttons are responsive, the wheel scrolls, changing the pointer speed works, etc. A point to note is that the the wheel click does not paste - to get that, you'll need to remap the buttons.
Remapping the buttons is slightly trickier, however. Not least because of Ubuntu's seemingly random changes to how it handles pointing devices. If you're happy with the buttons just as they are, you'll be fine. If you need to remap the buttons due to mobility issues, read on....
A quick "xinput list" gives us the device name.
"Evoluent VerticalMouse 4" id=8 [XExtensionPointer]
Type is MOUSE
Num_buttons is 14
Num_axes is 2
Mode is Relative
Motion_buffer is 256
Despite reporting 14 buttons, there are only 6 physical buttons available. Running
xinput query-state "Evoluent VerticalMouse 4"
tells us which buttons are being pressed down. Here are the results (the brackets signify the action, if any, that happens when you click the button).
- Index Finger (Left click)
- Ring Finger (Middle click)
- Little Finger (Right click)
- Scroll Up
- Scroll Down
- -
- -
- Top Thumb
- Wheel Click
- Bottom Thumb
- -
- -
- -
- -
Remapping The Buttons
There are two ways of remapping buttons. The lazy way and the correct way.
The "Lazy Way" - xinput
We can use xinput to set which buttons do what. The command is pretty simple
xinput set-button-map "Evoluent VerticalMouse 4" 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 Button 1---| | | Button 2---| | Button 3---|
So the first number is what you want Button 1 to do. So, if you want your index finger to be the wheel-click, and all other buttons to stay the same, the command is
xinput set-button-map "Evoluent VerticalMouse 4" 9 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
I like to have my thumb be the clicker, the wheel click paste, my ring finger right click, the index finger and little finger do nothing. So I use
xinput set-button-map "Evoluent VerticalMouse 4" 0 3 0 4 5 6 7 0 2 1 2
You can get that command to ruin at start-up. Different versions of Linux will do it differently - I've detailed some of the ways you can do this in Ubuntu in the forums.
The "Correct Way" - Xorg.conf.d
Ubuntu has an annoying habit of switching around how you configure the mouse - and no easy way to configure it graphically! This method should work on Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04.
Running lsusb tells us that the USB ID is
1a7c:0191
Create a new conf file
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-evoluent.conf
Use the following as a template
Section "InputClass" Identifier "Evoluent" MatchUSBID "1a7c:0191" Option "ButtonMapping" "0 3 0 4 5 6 7 0 2 1 2" EndSection
Substitute your own USB ID and preferred button mapping.
Hey presto! Your buttons are mapped.
Best of: What I blogged about in 2020
A year of WFL (Working From Linux)
The file transfer issue with mobile devices is my main issue. Why can't I just copy/paste files like I can easily do on Windows or Linux 😢(four and a half years into using a macbook as my main machine and this still pains me)
Wow, that's a red rag to put out there. RIP your mentions!
I'm sure you are going to be able to categorise them into: 1. Well actually, you can do X with incantation Y 2. Your needs are invalid/you are holding it wrong 3. It's not linux, it's GNU/Linux 4. Ubuntu can't do X tho
(I'm still a hardcore debian sort, so we are related...) I remember sending a curl to our PO, as he was all Mac, thinking, well, it is FreeBSD under the hood, right? But no. SteveJ seems to think it was...funny? to cripple all the tools, a simple curl failed on OSX. wtf dudes?
I know. 😭Doesn't make me less annoyed. Even copying and pasting on an iPhone didn't work last time I tried - needed to sync everything up, which is wholly unnecessary. Not all devices support airdrop.
Foobar says:
I think you’re looking for Mac System 7. You could do much of this back then.
Very much the four horsemen of the gnupocalypse
Wobbly windows really should be no.1
not having a sloppy cursor is my main gripe with my work macbook
but I guess it'd make that MacOS top bar completely unusable for anything that isn't maximised/full screen
Last time I was using someone's Mac I couldn't work out how to maximise a window fully. Is that possible?
No focus follows mouse?! Dead to me 🙂
Choice of double-clicking the title-bar or using the maximise button in the window decoration?
The green button isn't really maximize, it's a fullscreen button. It puts the window on a workspace of its own with no decorations until you bump the top of the screen with the cursor, so not maximize in the traditional sense as you can't put another window over it.
Double-click on the title bar should work. Except when it doesn't and decides to resize to some arbitrary region of the screen, and you have to minimize and unminimize to restore it to the maximizable state.
Andrew S. says:
Hold option while you hover mouse over the green button; it becomes a maximize button (instead of the default fullscreen behavior).
Also try holding down option when resizing windows, opening system menus in menu bar (sound, bluetooth).
Herman says:
Or press alt + the green button and suddenly it is maximize again. As it was before fullscreen was introduced. I believe you can actually switch the default.
Ubuntu ships with plenty of 3rd party software. I actually prefer to have a minimal installation and install whatever I need myself (I have a script for that). Default ubuntu is bloated in my opinion, but I agree that is a matter of taste, which is easier to solve in Distroland than in the closed OSX/Windows world.
Here are a list of 3rd party software that solves some of your issues. If not useful for you, it might be to someone who finds this post.
Focus follow mouse -Amethyst (Free and Opensource) Window Snapping - Amethyst, Moon (Paid), BetterSnapTool (Paid) or ShiftIt (free and opensource). SSH/NFS mounting - SSHFS/OSXFUSE/MacFusion (free, opensource, hard to use), MountainDuck (paid), Cyberduck (Paid), Expanddrive (Paid) Hiding notification icon - Deeper (Free)
Oh god, I forgot about the system font thing when doing my Twitter thread! All of my Windows machines are set to 150% because it's more comfortable to do that than to wear my glasses. Mac? Lots of squinting at the screen when I need to look at any app / area where I can't set the font size.
Would you like to buy a pair of Apple iBall 7s? They're only $1,799 each.
The lack of window snapping bothers me too, but interestingly I think that one might be actually be down to Microsoft having patented it (if I’m reading the filing right!)
patents.google.com/patent/US20160…
Amy Cupcake says:
No, this only patents the behaviour that makes a window switcher screen pop up on the opposite side of the screen, the old snapping behaviour long predates 2014
I’ve just started using MacOS after 20 years of Linux, and I miss middle click paste (amongst other things). There is a macpaste app, but it doesn’t quite work properly.
covid19 says:
Ouch, condolences... There used to be a time OS X was pleasant and a treat to use, somewhere right around Mountain Lion/Mavericks and beyond, each release has become more and more insulting to use, you can't tell where the cloud ends and where "your stuff" begins. They've tried so hard to turn the Mac into something it's not--a phone/tablet, that choice forever reverbs in the piss poor quality of Apple's current and future OS X releases. Multi billion dollar question is why is Steve Jobs not haunting the literal life out of Tim Cook? I feel sorry for the Mac. Not being able to bear it any longer, parted with the world of Apple forever once support for El Capitan was dropped, no regrets, never going back. The only thing I didn't initially have was iMessage, but with a little research have gotten my last time machine backup installed as a virtual machine. This is an ideal condition for me, as I believe the "more powerful" OS should be the host, and the slave should be the OS you only really need one or two things from. Bittersweet ending, but better than folding to the "Apple way", screw that I have my own way of doing things and I don't try to push it on anybody else, unlike Cooks idea of how technology should work
Richard Uschold says:
On Mac OS, there are very few options to change the Title Bar focus color. The difference between focused and not focused colors is rather subtle for my partly color blind eyes! None of the available options were much of an improvement. Not an issue on Linux or Windows.
I partly solved the mouse only copy-paste issues with BetterTouchTool. Not perfect, but you can program the mouse buttons, with a modifier key, to do these functions.
I was always confused by Mac's permitting the middle mouse wheel to scroll a NON-Focused window! Yet, this does not change the keyboard focus, and key strokes still go to the other window! I don't see how this makes any sense at all! ANY mouse button should change the focus, not just the left one!
Both Windows and Linux have hundreds of GUI items the user can change and each one has dozens to hundreds of possibilities. Mac OS has a mere handful of changeable items and a handful of possibilities for each. How is this user friendly? I guess, Uncle Steve knows best! NOT!
I've had two Mac Mini's and over half a dozen other computers, over the years. I've had as many hardware issues with the two macs as all my other computers combined.
My first Mac had more serious issues. The disk controller chip went bad and I had to replace the main circuit board. I assumed I had the bad luck of getting one of the few lemons that every manufacturer occasionally produces and bought the second.
After a few years, the second Mac started booting VERY SLOWLY! I googled this and discovered I had to reset the system parameters in the CMOS RAM. I also replaced the battery. Unfortunately, that didn't fix the problem! Every month or so, I had to reset the system parameters, again! Battery backed RAM? Seriously? Hasn't Apple heard of EEPROMs? They've only been around for decades! Apple is usually at the front of the pack applying new technology. What happened here?
Chris says:
macOS really isn't designed for extreme (or even moderate) customization. It's designed to offer a consistent experience for users who are more concerned with being comfortable in their content creation applications that run on the macOS platform. Also, Apple is a single company that has to support whatever they put out. So naturally they're going to have some discipline when it comes to providing options to customers. A lot of developers use macOS now too and signs of culture clash are appearing more frequently.
gluconate says:
Um, designed to offer a consistent experience? I'm sorry but that statement holds much more true for Windows than it does for Mac. This isn't a bashing post, simply pointing out for one, Windows releases have been supported for a whole decade, literally 10 years of support (cycle for 10 has changed, Enterprise is still supported 10 years); two, application support...Under a modern version of Windows, say 8 or 10, you'll have little to no issue running applications that were written in the XP era. XP era equates to around Tiger/Leopard...how much software do you have that still runs from a Tiger or Leopard mac on catalina? on mojave? on high sierra? Whenever Apple feels like it, support for products is dropped, whether you're just a smalltime end user or a large creative corp, Apple's OS releases are ONLY supported for maximum of 3 years, with no option for extended support (XP lived technically more than 15 years with the embedded trick, 12 years with no trick) Third and finally, ...the user interface. Everything from the dimensions of applications, awkward apps that really are designed for mobile and have no real place on a desktop, every release feels like something was taken, beaten and bastardized until it conformed to SOMETHING that looked like iOS, and thrown out there for the peasants (us) to test. Cook's idea of the Mac has completely and fully destroyed, annihilated, and forever doomed the future of the Mac. More than anything else, the Mac of today just gets in your way, this is coming from someone who used OSX for ~15 years. Like someone said above, it's not "think different" anymore, it's quite literally "think all the same". All devices are NOT the same, never were, never will be, Cook can try to part the seas and join the land and skies, at the end of the day the Mac will still be a heavily crippled Mac, and not an iOS device like they'd so badly desire it to be. Shame for destroying what was potentially the only commercially viable UNIX.
Fun to read your thoughts on this (-: I just returned a macbook air 9,1 brcause of its thermal behavior - supposedly in the first place. the truth is, i was good with the fact that macos is darwin and freebsd, and i would prefer it ten times over windows, but gnu/linux (my flavour: ubuntu with gnome classic panel on the bottom) is the real sophisticated enviroment, if you ask me! not that there are simple things in workflow, which are as a fact more intelligent (why cant i switch the menus in macos to the windows of the respectively app window? if they stay in the top panel, the way to go with the mouse is - as a matter of fact - ineffeciently farer!) And for sure i am missing a bottom panel, with a workspace indicator which shows me on a quick glance what virtual desktops contain open processes plus give me a quick control over all opened processes on that desktop (and no, the dock which indicates open processes/running apps with a dot behind them, is not alternative here.) so, long story short, i think macos is very smart, beautifull and for the most useres far better then windows. but it is not gnu/linux, it can not even touch it. a shame though, because the hardware design is fantastic. the only way i'd buy a macbook pro now, would be that i cant contribute the few groups which are trying to get gnu/linus on that machine. Best regards and have a great time, me (-:
Andrew says:
A fair list. I've used a macbook for the past 10 years (alongside windows, now nixos linux gaming pc), and I can have found my own solutions to one or two of them. Window snapping: BetterSnapTool (paid but cheap) Mouse button rebinding: BetterTouchTool (free) - though maybe not pure left click. Still, it has the touchpad which works better than anything else. Generally scrolling works without clicking on a window, but yeah...best of both worlds is to have multiple machines.
@Edent for the 'window snapping' thing, may I point thee to Rectangle? Let's you do tiling on macOS. It's good.
At least changing mouse button order (and much more complex keyboard modifications such as remapping keys, assigning different commands to F keys, making a hyper key, turning on super-duper mode etc.) is possible with Karabiner Elements.
Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu Link: shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/04/t… Comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=311655…
Out of the box you can probably fix some of these concerns with accessibility option tweaks. For the majority though "There's an app for that!"
These will probably cost money, or be SIMBL plugins that require you to disable SIP For them to function correctly...
Since Big Sur there is now an accessibility option to increase the size of the menubar.
NFS is probably a little more fiddly: https://lowhangingfruit.dev/2019-10-21/automount-nfs-on-macos/
Jesse says:
How about something as simple as being able to alt-tab (cmd-tab) through windows and pick a minimized one. Mac users will say "just don't minimize windows". Really? Changing a common workflow because Apple has an inferior way to choose applications isn't a good answer.
There's the "desktop" view which shows thumbnails barfed all over the screen in a hard to grok fashion, with no application icons and have you have to hover over to see the name.
I don't understand how anyone that has more than two applications open at once thinks that MacOS has a good UI.
Henderson101 says:
Firstly, use multiple workspaces/desktops. I do this even on Windows. I don't know how anyone can have all their running apps in one desktop.
Don't Alt/Cmd tab. Use Mission Control. Notice minimised apps live in the dock. I don't alt-tab, even on windows, I use the Task View - which is basically the same as Mission Control.
Jeroen says:
To get Windows-like alt-tab behavior on macOS there's the excellent AltTab [1] for that. It works on multiple workspaces, btw.
I'm currently using Sway on my work laptop, macOS for my personal laptop, and Windows (under Proxmox) for gaming. The difference in keybinds drives me insane. Also, the touchpad on my 7 years old MBP is better than my work laptop (XPS).
[1] https://github.com/lwouis/alt-tab-macos
rjc says:
Finder -> GO -> Connect to Server... or simplu Apple+k key combination. Then simply type:
nfs://hostname:/path/to/shareOnce opened, drag its title bar icon onto Favourites in Finder and you have yourself a shorcut :^)
That's pretty much any Linux distribution - most software there is 3rd-party and, by the time the packaged version hits the official repository, it is already out of date and unsupported by upstream, or even distribution itself, bar critical security vulnerabilities.
Even i always recommend Apple computers to people, your reasons make sense and i agree with you. This is Apple and they say "if we decided something, you don't need to decide". Actually that works many times but yes "not everytime".
Things I can’t do on MacOS which I can do on Ubuntu door @edent (shkspr.mobi)
Ik merk dat ik meeknik met de redenen die Terrence geeft. Tegelijk weet ik dat Linux me meer hoofdpijn kan geven om dingen voor elkaar te krijgen. Ik kan al niet meer zonder de copy-paste overdracht met iOS bijvoorbeeld. « Community is the future of AI