I've written about my unreasonable feature wish list for a computer mouse before. This post is about the best mouse that I found to buy according to my standards
To name it right away, it's a Razor Viper. The buttons and the wheel do not have the quality I was used to during the 2000s from using cheap Logitech and generic OEM mice. But they did survive my house being a dusty building site for a long while, which isn't true of most other mice's switches. The left and right buttons work as reliably as I could hope for. The middle one needed some cleaning and still isn't as good as in the beginning. I have to press it harder than I'd like. The wheel turns very easily with a slight and almost silent step. That is much softer that I'd like it to be. Other than those of cheaper mice it does still work reliably. The coating of the wheel has long gone. So it's unusable with greacy fingers. But those of cheaper mice are all the same and mice with better rubber tyres from Razor aren't available anymore, it appears. The Viper (Ultimate, 8kHz or newer version, not the Mini) is slightly on the bigger side. It's simple and usual design makes grabbing it and moving it quickly reliably easy. But it is not quite as big as I would wish for. Its cable has a synthetic textile sheath and is very flexible. The best mouse cable I've ever had. There is a wireless version, too. My variant doesn't have the side buttons. While it looks like they are there, they can't be pressed and there are no switches. So I can't accidentally navigate back and forth like with other mice. After two years of not opening it, a surprising amount of dirt entered the case. Beside the mentioned problem with pressing the middle button (wheel) this doesn't seem to be a problem though. There seems to be two wholes below the big buttons where the more gunky dirt collects and drips down beside the switches.
Modifications
Since it comes with LEDs inside (for a glowing Razor logo on the back) I had to take care of those. There is a GUI configuration tool for Windows and a very basic open source CLI tool for Linux systems. The latter can't be installed easily on all distros though. Since I wanted them to be off all the time anyway, I just unplugged them. They are conveniently placed on their own, separate PCBs, connected to the rest of the electronics with cables. So they can easily be removed or unplugged. While I had it open, I've added steel weights by glueing in isolated screws. You could add a bit more weight by creating the right shape of metal parts. But this was sufficiant for me. On the bottom plate replaced the small and very thin rubber feet with way thicker felt ones. The new ones also collect dirt like crazy. But they can take a lot more of it and don't make the mouse wiggle from it.
This is far from my ideas mouse. But it is one that can be bought right now. At ~60 € it's not even that pricey compared to what's out there. In my next post about I will write about the mouse that I'm actually using that can't be bought anymore.