Middle mouse button in Blender on a Mac

Blender's viewport is built around the middle mouse button: drag to orbit, ⇧+drag to pan, ⌃+drag to zoom. On a MacBook there is no such button. These are the three ways around it.

1. Blender's own trackpad gestures

Blender does read Mac trackpad gestures natively: two-finger scroll orbits, ⇧ + two-finger scroll pans, ⌃ + two-finger scroll zooms, and pinch zooms. This is enough for casual viewport navigation and needs nothing installed. It falls short when an add-on, a tool or a tutorial assumes a real middle button, and for the many operations where MMB does something other than orbit (dragging a value slider, panning the node editor, box-selecting in the outliner).

2. Emulate 3 Button Mouse

Preferences → Input → Emulate 3 Button Mouse turns ⌥ + left drag into a middle drag. It's reliable, but it hijacks ⌥, which Blender uses for other things (loop select is ⌥+click, and the conflict is why the preference has a "Modifier" dropdown). Many people switch it to ⌘ or OSKey to reduce collisions.

3. A real middle button from the trackpad

The Mid Click turns a three-finger click into a genuine middle-button event. For Blender, use Click mode, not Tap:

  1. In The Mid Click, set Trigger to Click.
  2. Rest three fingers on the trackpad and press. Keep pressing and move: Blender sees a middle-drag and orbits.
  3. Add ⇧ while dragging to pan, ⌃ to zoom, exactly as with a mouse.

Because it is a real button event, every MMB behaviour in Blender works: value sliders, node editor panning, the outliner, timeline scrubbing, and any add-on that binds MMB. Nothing in Blender's preferences needs to change, and ⌥ stays free.

Other 3D and CAD apps

The same Click mode works wherever middle-drag moves the camera: Fusion 360 (pan), Rhino (orbit), SketchUp (orbit), Unity and Unreal (pan and fly), Godot (orbit), and Figma or Miro for panning a 2D canvas. Each has its own keyboard fallback, but they all accept the real button.

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