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The mouse gesture for "back" in Opera – the user holds down the right mouse button, moves the mouse left, and releases the right mouse button or an alternative way is to hold the right button down and then click the left mouse button.

In computing, a mouse gesture is a way of combining computer mouse movements and clicks which the software recognizes as a specific command. Mouse gestures can provide quick access to common functions of a program. They can also be useful for people who have difficulties typing on a keyboard. For example, in a web browser, the user could navigate to the previously viewed page by pressing the right mouse button, moving the mouse briefly to the left, then releasing the button.

The first mouse gesture, the "drag," was introduced by Apple to replace a dedicated "move" button on mouses shipped with its Macintosh and Lisa computers. Dragging involves holding down a mouse button while moving the mouse; the software interprets this as an action distinct from separate clicking and moving behaviors. Although this behavior has been adopted in a huge variety of software packages, few other gestures have been as successful.

As of 2005, most programs do not support gestures other than the drag operation. Each program that recognizes mouse gestures does so in its own way, sometimes allowing for very short mouse movement distances to be recognized as gestures, and sometimes requiring very precise emulation of a certain movement pattern (e.g. circle). Some implementations allow users to customize these factors.

Some video games have used mouse gestures. For example, in the Myth real-time tactics series, originally created by Bungie Software, players use them to order battlefield units to move in a desired direction. Another game using mouse gestures is Lionhead's Black & White. The game Arx Fatalis uses mouse gestures for drawing runes in the air to cast spells. The demo video suggests that some of Nintendo's Wii games will take advantage of such a system. "Okami" for the Playstation 2 system uses a system similar to mouse gestures; when the player enters a certain mode, they can hold a face button and move the analog stick to create a shape (circle, half-circle, line, etc) that performs a function such as creating a bomb, or changing from night to day.

The Opera web browser has recognized mouse gestures since version 5.10 (April 2001). Several mouse gesture extensions are also available for the Mozilla Firefox browser, such as the Optimoz Mouse Gestures extension that offer also Rocker gestures performed by pressing one mouse button while holding down the other (this offers two additional commands, usually moving forward/backward). These extensions use almost identical gestures as Opera.

Some tools provide mouse gestures support in any application, such as Sensiva, StrokeIt and Mojo Gesture for Microsoft Windows. KDE includes universal mouse gesture support since version 3.2.

A major drawback of current gesture interaction solutions is the lack of support for two necessary user interface design principles, feedback and visibility. Feedback notification is required to indicate whether the gesture has been entered correctly by indicating the gesture recognized and the corresponding command activated, although Sensiva does approach this to some extent in providing voice notification. Mojo Sidekick provides an alternative solution with a pop-up click-through notification. The other principal is visibility of gestures, providing the user some means of learning the necessary gestures and the contexts they can be used in. Mojo gesture does this to some extent by providing pop-up cheat-sheets, that show a list of gestures, when the mouse pointer is held down.

One limitation with gesture interaction is the scope context in which the gestures can be used. For example each gesture has only one corresponding command for each application window. Mojo gesture has an interesting solution to this, which addresses this to some extent, by using floating click-through controls called charms, which allow an additional gesture context for each Charm control, however floating controls are not for everyone.

Note that holding down buttons while moving the mouse can be awkward and requires some practice, since the downwards action increases friction for the horizontal motion. An optical mouse would be less susceptible to changes in behavior than a ball mouse with increased friction because the sensor does not rely on mechanical contact to sense movement; a touchpad provides no added friction with all its buttons held down with a thumb. However, it was also argued that muscular tension resulting from holding down buttons could be exploited in user interface design as it gives constant feedback that the user is in a temporary state, or mode (Buxton, 1995).

These applications add gestures to any software running on system:

• Brass via Mime plugin
• StrokeIt
• MauSuji
• Mojo Sidekick

• FlyGesture, a freeware application
• Quicksilver has a feature for recognizing mouse gestures
• xGestures
• CocoaGestures
• Mojo Sidekick

• wayV
• xstroke
• KHotkeys provides native gestures support in KDE
• Freehand Gestures for KDE
• Configuring native strokes in FVWM
• xgestures

• SkyOS Mouse Gestures SkyOS has native support of mouse gestures

These apps support gestures on their own:

• Documentation of mouse gestures in Maxthon.
• Documentation of mouse gestures in Opera.
• OptiMoz, All-in-One Mouse Gestures and easyGestures add mouse gesture and/or pie menu support to Mozilla Firefox. [These are rather old links]
• Reference of gestures in Motion.
• Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer
• Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer 7 by IE7pro

• iGesture Open Source Java framework for pen and mouse-based gesture recognition.
• Java Swing Mouse Gestures Open source pure Java library for recognition and processing mouse gestures.
• LibStroke is a stroke translation library in C/Java
• Lipi Toolkit Open source toolkit that supports recognition of arbitrary pen and mouse-based gestures as well as handwritten characters.

• Drag-and-drop
• Pie menu
• Computer accessibility

• Buxton, W. A. (1995). "Chunking and phrasing and the design of human-computer dialogues" in Human-Computer interaction: Toward the Year 2000, R. M. Baecker, J. Grudin, W. A. Buxton, and S. Greenberg, Eds. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco, CA, 494-499.

• The Gesture Recognition Home Page