Published 25 July 2026
MiddleClick and WheelClick: what stays free
I wrote both. This page exists so that nobody has to take my word for what happens to the free one — it is dated, it is public, and it is the thing to quote back at me if any of it stops being true.
MiddleClick stays exactly where it is
MiddleClick stays free,
stays GPL-3.0, stays downloadable, and brew install --cask middleclick keeps working.
Nothing that works today is being removed, gated behind a payment, or wrapped in a nag screen. It
has never collected any data and it never will.
What is true, and worth saying plainly: it is finished. No new features and no support. It was started by Clément Beffa in 2009, kept alive by a series of people who fixed it whenever a new macOS broke it, and I picked it up in 2019. The work went into a rewrite instead, and the rewrite is WheelClick.
The middle click it gave you is free in WheelClick, permanently
Three-finger click and three-finger tap keep working in WheelClick forever. Not a trial, not a countdown, no account, no nag. Those are the two gestures MiddleClick existed for, and if they are all you ever wanted, switching costs you nothing.
They are not a cut-down build, either. The free gestures run on the same event layer as the paid ones and get the same reliability work — the part the rewrite was actually for. There is no worse version of WheelClick for people who don't pay.
What each one does
| Feature | MiddleClick | WheelClick |
|---|---|---|
| Three-finger click | ✓ | Free |
| Three-finger tap | ✓ | Free |
| Palm and resting-hand rejection | — | Free |
| Works alongside macOS Three Finger Drag (both at once) | — | Free |
| Measured energy cost per gesture | — | Free |
| Configurable finger count | ✓ | Adaptive |
| Middle-Drag (pan and orbit in CAD) | — | Paid |
| Magic Mouse gestures | ✓ | Paid |
| Force Click | — | Paid |
| Per-app ignore list | ✓ | Paid |
| Per-app allow-list | — | Paid |
| fn+Click | — | Paid |
| Autoscroll | — | Paid |
| Three-finger swipe | — | Paid |
Three rows cut against WheelClick, and I would rather list them than claim a parity that isn't there. Configurable finger count is MiddleClick's: you set the number. WheelClick doesn't hand you that setting — it picks, and only where a real collision is known. This page said Soon until 18 August 2026, and withdrawing that is the honest thing to do rather than the quiet thing: a finger-count setting turned out to be a way of handing the question which count is free on your Mac? back to the person least able to answer it. What people actually hit are specific collisions with specific macOS settings, and those are worth solving one at a time, by name — when macOS's Zoom gesture is on, WheelClick reads the trackpad a stage earlier so the click keeps its three fingers, and moves only the tap to four, because Zoom's own trigger is a three-finger double-tap. Then two things are simply free there and paid here: the Magic Mouse gestures — MiddleClick reads that mouse through the same private multitouch framework, and this table used to say it didn't — and the per-app list.
One more difference isn't in the table because it isn't a feature: MiddleClick runs on macOS 10.13 and later, WheelClick needs macOS 13. If your Mac is older than Ventura, MiddleClick isn't merely still an option — it is the only one of the two you can run, and that is part of why it stays where it is.
Nor is where you get them: MiddleClick installs from Homebrew or GitHub Releases, and WheelClick from the Mac App Store, Homebrew, or a direct download. One catch worth knowing before picking a shop — the App Store build has no Magic Mouse gestures. Reading that mouse's fingers needs something the sandbox will not allow, a limit every App Store app shares, and the long version is here.
Why the successor is paid
Seven years of a free app funded none of the seven years. $4.99 once, no subscription, no account required to try it, and what it buys is everything WheelClick added on top of the two gestures — not the two gestures.
It also buys the thing this page opened with. The reason this app kept dying every few years is that noticing was nobody's job: a new macOS broke it, whoever needed it most fixed their own copy, and then life moved on. A middle click that still works five macOS releases from now needs someone for whom that is the job. Paying for it is what makes it one.
WheelClick is a new codebase and it is closed source. MiddleClick's source is untouched by that and stays GPL-3.0, so anyone who wants the open one still has it, and anyone who wants to fork it still can. That is what the license is for.
The commitment
- Nothing you have today is taken away. MiddleClick keeps working exactly as it works now — same license, same cask, nothing removed, nothing gated, no expiry — and the two gestures it gave you are free in WheelClick as well, so moving costs you nothing either. That holds now and in every later release.
What staying does cost you is everything that comes after it: the reliability work the rewrite was for, the energy engineering, the plugins, and whatever gets built next. That is a real cost and it is yours to weigh. It is not the same thing as having something taken from you — and non-removal is the only promise I am actually in a position to make, so it is the one I am making.
Questions, or something on this page that stopped being true? Write to me.