My New Mac, Lion Edition

Double-Clicking the Mouse and Trackpad

Double-clicking means pressing and releasing the left mouse button (or trackpad) twice in rapid succession. Double-clicking is basically a shortcut for eliminating multiple single clicks to select an item and then choose a menu command. For example, to open a file without double-clicking, you would need to follow four steps:

1. Move the pointer over the file you want to open.

2. Click the file to tell your Macintosh that this is the file you want to perform a command on.

3. Click the File menu title. A pull-down menu appears.

4. Click the Open command. (From now on, this book will explain how to choose a menu title and a command by using the shorter description “Select File ▸ Open.”)

Rather than click three different times, ...