Hey there!

Having the right gear is essential for architects – it can make your life a lot easier. I’ll have the occasional post that will go over some of the hardware and tools that I like to use. First up, the gaming mouse.

A gaming mouse might sound like overkill for an architect, but I bought one about 3 years ago and haven’t looked back. A mouse is something you use everyday, for what I would imagine would be almost the entire day. It should be something that’s durable and comfortable. I mean you can buy something that’s cheap, but trust me when I say that the gaming mouse is worth a few extra bucks. The best part is, they aren’t very expensive. I picked mine up for around $50 or so.

So why do I recommend a gaming mouse in particular? It’s mainly for two reasons: 
1) It’s comfortable 
2) You can program keyboard commands to it. 

To the first point. It’s way more comfortable than a cheap 10 dollar mouse that you pick up at Office Max. The one I have fits my hand really well. There’s tons of different varieties that cater to your hand size and how you grip the mouse. I recommend going to Best Buy and trying out a few different ones and see what fits your hand the best.

And to the second point. I absolutely love having a few extra buttons on my mouse. I have a total of five extra buttons that I all have programmed to do a certain task for me. You can have it set up so that it’s program-specific or universal. For example, if I open up Revit, I can have the buttons on my mouse assigned to keyboard commands. And then when I open up Photoshop, I could have them programmed to do different keyboard commands that are just for Photoshop. 

I don’t get that in depth with mine. I just have a set of universal commands that I use in most programs. In my particular scenario I have setup my buttons to:
1. Copy
2. Paste
3. Tab
4. Escape
5. Back

Maybe you would consider it laziness, but I like to call it efficiency. If you’re skeptical, give it a try! You can always give it a try and return it if you really hate it. But, I think once you have a gaming mouse, it’s going to be really hard to go back to anything else.

If you’re interested in trying out the mouse I have, it’s called the Logitech G502 Hero. You can pick it up at Amazon for under 50 bucks. I really like this one, and I’d definitely recommend you give it a try!