Comparison

WheelClick vs MiddleDrag

For middle-click and middle-drag on a trackpad on macOS 15 or later, MiddleDrag does the job for free and is MIT open source. WheelClick fits if you are on macOS 12 to 14, which MiddleDrag doesn’t support, use a Magic Mouse, or want system-wide autoscroll and per-app rules; its trackpad three-finger click and tap are free forever.

macOS understands a middle click everywhere, but Apple’s trackpads and the Magic Mouse have no way to make one, and macOS has never had the autoscroll Windows and Linux users take for granted. Anyone who switches platforms with that muscle memory ends up looking for an app. WheelClick and MiddleDrag are two independent answers to that same gap, built by different developers with different approaches; neither is a copy of the other. Below is an honest, attribute-by-attribute comparison so you can pick the one that fits how you work.

MiddleDrag is by Karan Kunal Mohindroo — its site is here. MiddleDrag is a free, MIT-licensed menu-bar app that turns a three-finger tap into a middle click and a three-finger drag into a middle-drag, reading raw touch data through Apple’s private MultitouchSupport framework so it can coexist with Mission Control.

Side by side

Cells marked “Not documented” mean MiddleDrag’s own materials don’t state it either way — we would rather leave a blank than publish a guess about someone else’s app. Every cell was re-verified against MiddleDrag’s own current materials on 31 August 2026; if something has gone stale since, tell us and it gets fixed. Comparing more than one alternative? See the full comparison — WheelClick and every middle-click app in one table.

The two apps take genuinely different technical routes: MiddleDrag reads raw touches through a private Apple framework before macOS processes them; WheelClick works from the public Accessibility API and re-arms macOS’s event taps when the system silently disables them. It reaches for that private framework in one place only — Magic Mouse touches, which no public API exposes — and there it runs in a separate helper process rather than in the app. Both approaches are legitimate; they just fail, and recover, differently.

Which one fits you

Pick MiddleDrag if you run macOS 15 or later, use only a trackpad, want middle-click and middle-drag and nothing else, and prefer free, open-source software. MiddleDrag does that job well, and being MIT-licensed means anyone can read and fork it.

Pick WheelClick if you are on macOS 12 to 14 (MiddleDrag needs 15+), use a Magic Mouse, want system-wide autoscroll rather than only in apps that implement it, or want per-app rules — plus fn+click and Force Click triggers, and a codebase that stays on public APIs everywhere macOS allows it to.

Either way you end up with a middle click your Mac should arguably have shipped with — see why macOS never did.

More comparisons: vs Middle · vs MiddleTouch · vs Multitouch · vs BetterTouchTool · vs MagicPrefs · vs Jitouch · vs MiddleClick · all of them at once