Mac Basics: How To Right Click

Learn about the various ways you can right click on a Mac. This is also called control clicking or simply bringing up a context menu. In games you may need to check the settings to figure things out.
Check out Mac Basics: How To Right Click at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.
Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about right clicking on a Mac. 
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So when someone says they want to right click what they mean is clicking the second button, the right button, on a mouse. However, Apple mice like this one don't seem to have separate left and right buttons and trackpads don't have any buttons at all. So when you say you want to right click what you really mean is you want to use a secondary click. That's opposed to a primary click. So you may think of a left click as a primary click and a right click as a secondary click. But what you're really doing, in most cases, is bringing up a Context Menu. So it's also proper to say, Bring up a Context Menu. I'll talk about what a Context Menu is in a minute. But that's what you usually get with a right click or the equivalent on a trackpad. So if you use an Apple mouse like this one, yours probably is white, then you can usually get a secondary click by clicking on the right side. Even though it doesn't appear that there are two separate buttons here the mouse knows where you're actually holding your finger when you click down. 
Now whether clicking on the right side triggers a secondary click or not depends on your settings. Go into System Preferences and under Mouse look for Secondary Click. This has to be turned On, first of all, and then you get to choose what triggers a secondary click. By default it's click on the right side although you could set it to click on the left side. But what if you have a trackpad? There are no buttons. So how do you trigger the secondary click. On Trackpad Settings, under Point & Click, there's an option here for Secondary Click as well. You should have that turned On. You could set it to Click or Tap with two fingers, Click in the bottom right or bottom left corner. The best way to do it is Click or Tap with two fingers. If you have a trackpad if you use one finger to click down that's the left click or primary click. Two fingers simulates the right click or secondary click. 
But there's another way to trigger a secondary click. It doesn't matter what your settings are and it doesn't matter if you're using a mouse or a trackpad. That's to hold the Control key down on your keyboard and click normally on either the mouse or trackpad. In other words clicking on the left side of your mouse or just a single finger click on a trackpad. As long as you're holding the Control key down this changes that click from a primary click to a secondary click. Note that this is the Control key. NOT the Command key. Now this is why this is often called Control Clicking. As a matter of fact Apple usually refers to it as a Control Click, not a right click, not a two finger click, not bringing up the Context Menu. But simply Control Click or Control Clicking. The great thing about this is it works in all situations. It doesn't matter what your settings are. It doesn't matter if you have a mouse or a trackpad. If you tell somebody to Control Click on something that will work. Whereas two finger clicking on a trackpad may be disabled. Right clicking on a mouse may be disabled. But Control Clicking will always work. 
So what happens when you use the secondary click. Well usually that brings up a Context Menu. So this is what you get when you Control Click on a file like this one. This is called a Context Menu. Notice it looks like a menu that you would bring up here from the Menu Bar. But instead of it being a regular menu it's a Context Menu. It shows you items based on what it is that you clicked. In other words it is context based. In this case I've Control Clicked this file. These are the options I get when I do that. If I were to Control Click on the Desktop background here I would get options that have to do with the Desktop background. If I were to Control Click on the Toolbar here at the top of the window I get a menu with options based on what I Control Clicked. The Toolbar here. It works like this in just about any app. If I Control Click on a date here in the Calendar app, I get the ability to create a new event. If I Control Click on an Event I get choices based on what I Control Clicked. In the Photos app if I Control Click on a photo I get commands here based on the fact that I Control Clicked on a photo.
So if somebody like me says bring up the Context Menu for that item what they mean is to Control Click, right click or two finger click on a  trackpad, that item to bring up the Context Menu. It's also the best way to figure out what you can do with an item. Whether you're in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, whatever it is Control Clicking on something will reveal a lot of the different things that you could do with that item. So if you're trying to figure out how to get something done, whether it's in the Finder or in an app, try Control Clicking on that item and see what comes up. 
Now sometimes right clicking, Control Clicking, or two finger clicking on a trackpad isn't about bringing up a Context Menu. Usually that is in games. Sometimes in games there will be an action performed with a left click and a different action performed with a right click. In that case what you need to do is go into the game's settings. Usually there's a place where you can see or even customize all of the different keyboard shortcuts and mouse and trackpad options. A lot of times in the Windows version of the game what you would see for right click will be either right click on a Mac or it may actually show up as something different on a Mac. So you have to check in those settings there. So if your question is how do I right click because a game tells me I need to use right click to do something, then first try right clicking on the mouse and make sure that is setup properly in System Preferences or two finger clicking on a trackpad. Or Control Clicking. But if none of those work you may have to go into the game's settings, look for all of the keyboard shortcuts and other things, and see how you can setup that action to be performed on your Mac because the developers may have decided to do it differently on the Mac than on Windows but maybe the article or the instructions you're reading don't mention that.
Mac Basics: How To Right Click

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