It’s said we spend a third of our lives sleeping, so it makes sense to spend good money on a mattress. Likewise, if you spend most of your workday with a mouse in hand, you might as well spend good money on a well-designed mouse for comfort’s sake. And if you do that, you owe it to yourself to at least try using a vertical mouse.
Conventional mice keep the user’s hand horizontal, with the wrists slightly twisted inwards. Vertical mice are sculpted to keep the hands in a position closer to what you’d have when giving a handshake. This reduces torsion on the wrist and arm, and avoids some of the repetitive stress injuries regular mice can cause.
That’s the theory, anyway. How does it work in practice?
Getting a grip on the vertical mouse
I didn’t even know about vertical mice until about 10 years ago, when a friend gave me one he’d been assigned for a product test. He already had a workaday vertical mouse of his own, so I claimed the tester—made by a company named Evoluent—and gave it a spin.
Every change of a peripheral—mouse, keyboard, even screen—takes time to get used to. It took me one somewhat clumsy week of very intense mousing to get used to the Evoluent mouse. I kept wanting to cover it with my palm from the top, like a regular mouse, instead of take it in a “handshake” grip. Worse, I kept knocking it over; the Evoluent mouse’s design made it particularly susceptible to tipping, falling over, and accidental clicking.
But after that first frustrating week, regular mice started to feel weird to my hands. The Evoluent, and vertical mouse designs in general, felt more complementary—not only to my hand and arm, but to my overall posture when sitting at a computer. I use a high drafting stool with a footrest ring, so I’m forced to sit up straight and allow my arms to hang low. The vertical mouse keeps my arm in what feels like a more natural position in this arrangement.
Over the next decade or so, I used the Evoluent mouse nonstop, to the point where its buttons started to malfunction and the whole unit started looking grubby. By that point, around 2022, vertical mice were more common, and so I replaced the once-costly Evoluent (around $100) with a relatively inexpensive model from a company named Nulea (around $20).
The Nulea vertical mouse showed me how even small differences in the design of any mouse, but especially a vertical one, can have major impacts. For one, the buttons on the Nulea were positioned differently. The “back” button, directly below the thumb in the Evoluent model, was above the thumb on the Nulea model. It took more flexing and stretching for my thumb to reach that button. Consequently, I didn’t use it as much, but I also didn’t accidentally smack it anywhere nearly as often. The Nulea’s more asymmetrical footprint also meant it was much harder to accidentally tip over by merely brushing it with a waved hand. Or if one of my three cats decided to get frisky on my desk.
The future is vertical
I’ve evangelized for the vertical mouse experience with friends who also spend a lot of time in front of a screen. Not everyone is inclined to try it, but those that do are surprised both by how quickly they adjust—and by the payoffs. A friend who works long hours in a doctor’s office bought a vertical mouse for her PC at home and found her carpal tunnel issues cleared up in short order. She’s now angling to get one to replace her work mouse, as well. The total time spent adjusting to the new form factor is about one day.
My friend who introduced me to vertical mice continues to use one himself, and a fairly high-end one at that: the Logitech MX Vertical, which retails for $99. It has more of the features you see in high-end mice generally, like the textured surface (the Nulea is plain sculpted plastic) and the overall engineering quality. But the vertical form factor mouse is no longer a pricey oddity or a luxury item. Most every mouse-maker has a vertical design, so there’s an incarnation for every price point.
If you haven’t tried a vertical mouse yet, it will require some patience and accommodation, in the same way an ergonomic keyboard or a widescreen monitor also takes some adjustment. But once you have a vertical mouse in hand, you may feel—as I did—that it always belonged there.