File this under small victories, I guess. A couple months ago my trusty old ThinkPad R51 decided to cook itself to death, so I went ahead and got a shiny new ThinkPad T500. It’s quite an upgrade, but I missed one feature from my old machine. ThinkPads have this weird hybrid pointing device called a TrackPoint which consists of a trackpad and two buttons, then a nubbin-pointer and three buttons for that. On my old ThinkPad I could use the nubbin’s center button as a middle-click, which is great for opening links in new tabs, closing tabs, Unix-style copy/paste, etc.
I didn’t even use the nubbin, I just used its button. However, on my new ThinkPad, the center button switched the nubbin to scrolling mode, and turning that off in the driver just made the button do nothing! However, I recently stumbled upon the solution. If you completely uninstall the UltraNav driver, the middle button becomes a normal middle mouse button again, and the nubbin and trackpad still work. Tab management is easy again!
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