RE: Help buffer key bindings

[Drew Adams]

    > Emacs should go ahead and bind the 4th and 5th mouse buttons
    to standard
    > behaviors (e.g. Back and Forward in Info and Help). There are
    at least two
    > ways to do this:

    Are buttons 4 and 5 really standardized on "forward" and "back", or is
    it just what you use?

    The mice I've seen with > 3 buttons have had them in apparently random
    positions, so it's not an idel question.

Good question; you're right to raise it. I thought this was pretty standard,
but googling just now indicates that mice with more than 3 buttons are still
fairly uncommon, and there seems to be no super-standard button mapping.

However, from what I could find, the most common multi-button mice are the
MS IntelliPoint and Logitech MouseWare families (those are the driver
names). For the versions that have more than the 3 main buttons (of which,
the middle is also a wheel), the 4th button of both IntelliPoint and
MouseWare is, by default, a navigational Back button for use in applications
like Web browsers. The 5th button is a Forward button. Both are easily
configurable, however, so there is no guarantee, even for these mice, that a
user has buttons 4 and 5 mapped to Back and Forward.

Here is a page that shows these two kinds of multi-button mouse, with their
button mappings:
http://www.tcmagazine.info/articles.php?action=show&id=62&perpage=1&pagenum=
6.

While the terrain of greatest application of such mice seems to be MS
Windows, it seems that both of these mice also work on GNU/Linux.

So, yes, I was wrong in thinking that 4=Back and 5=Forward are standard
mappings. But it also seems like they are perhaps the most common mappings,
today (that could change tomorrow). I'm no expert on this - this is just my
impression. Perhaps someone else has more definite info?