Windows 7 mouse multi selection on windows explorer with CTRL and point to select / single click to open

mouseselectionwindows 7windows-explorer

This is something that has annoyed me since I changed to Windows 7.

I haven't done double clicking for a long time now since Windows introduced single click activation (Folder Options > Click items as follows > Single click to open an item).

The problem is, when I press CTRL and hover over the items, they get selected/deselected automatically with every small amount of mouse movement I make.

What I want is to select/deselect the items only when I enter/exit them. So to deselect an item I'm hovering, I have to move the mouse off of it, and then back on.

I'm using the official IntelliMouse Explorer drivers.


(edit)

Here's another related annoyance: when you are hovering over something and move the mouse onto another item (while holding CTRL) the new item may or may not get selected. If you continue moving the mouse it gets selected/deselected as you move.


(more edit)

I have found that the parameter HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse\MouseHoverHeight / MouseHoverWidth have some influence here. If it's set to 2, the item select/deselect really quickly as you move the mouse. When set to larger numbers, its slower. But setting to 20 or 200 doesn't seem to make much difference.

Best Answer

There are several mouse registry settings from HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Mouse that might help you here :

MouseHoverTime : REG_SZ : hover time in milliseconds : 400 default
MouseHoverWidth : REG_SZ : hover width in pixels * 2 : 4 default (2 pixels)
MouseHoverHeight : REG_SZ : hover height in pixels * 2 : 4 default (2 pixels)

Width and height define the size of the hover rectangle, or in other words the number of pixels that the mouse can move and still be considered as hovering in-place. The hover-time specifies how long the mouse pointer has to stay in the hover rectangle before a mouse hover message is generated.

I have managed to duplicate some of your problems, and it seems to me that the "Single click to open an item" mode was really badly done by Microsoft, to select an item by just hovering over it. However, the behavior still looks consistent to me.

If you have changed mouse parameters, this might have had the effect of throwing off the mouse behavior.

My own preference is to counsel you to return all mouse parameters to the default and to turn off "Single click to open an item".

I also do not like double-clicking, but my solution was to program the wheel-click of my mouse as a double-click, this way achieving double-click via a single-click without monkeying with the mouse parameters. Microsoft software does not always work reliably with non-default parameters.

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