Jquery: detect if middle or right mouse button is clicked, if so, do this:

You may want to trap the mousedown event, and you also need to prevent the oncontextmenu event to stop the context menu from coming up during the right click event.

$("h2").live('mousedown', function(e) { 
   if( (e.which == 1) ) {
     alert("left button");
   }if( (e.which == 3) ) {
     alert("right button");
   }else if( (e.which == 2) ) {
      alert("middle button"); 
   }
   e.preventDefault();
}).live('contextmenu', function(e){
   e.preventDefault();
});

UPDATE: .live() has been deprecated since jQuery 1.9. Use .on() instead.

$("h2").on('mousedown', function(e) { 
  if (e.which == 1) {
    alert("left button");
  } else if (e.which == 3) {
    alert("right button");
  } else if (e.which == 2) {
    alert("middle button");
  }
  e.preventDefault();
});

I've noticed some oddities in the past with using the click event for anything but a regular left-click. I don't recall the details, but if you change "click" to "mousedown" or "mouseup" you should have better results.


Now button has been fouled up beyond all recognition. According to W3C its values should be:

  • Left button – 0
  • Middle button – 1
  • Right button – 2

According to Microsoft its values should be:

  • Left button – 1
  • Middle button – 4
  • Right button – 2

No doubt the Microsoft model is better than W3C’s. 0 should mean “no button pressed”, anything else is illogical.

From http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events_properties.html