Disable system wide Ctrl+Click in OS X

I'm used to navigating through my code using Ctrl+Click. In OS X this function still works in my IDE, but it opens a context menu as well, which is very annoying!

I've done lots of Googling and didn't manage to find any answers that would let me disable Ctrl+Click system-wide in OS X 10.6.7. All the answers that I was able to find refer to Fusion and VMware.

I have a proper mouse with two buttons, I never used Ctrl+Click and cannot see the use case for it. Could someone please tell me how to disable it?


You can map control+click to command+click globally with KeyRemap4Macbook. Put the following in your private.xml:

<root>
    <item>
        <name>Control+LeftClick Command+LeftClick</name>
        <appendix>Control+LeftClick Command+LeftClick</appendix>
        <identifier>control_click_to_command_click</identifier>
        <autogen>--PointingButtonToPointingButton-- PointingButton::LEFT, ModifierFlag::CONTROL_L, PointingButton::LEFT, ModifierFlag::COMMAND_L</autogen>
    </item>
</root>

This will cause any ctrl-click you type to be seen by the system as -click. That will prevent the contextual menu (since you won't actually be producing a ctrl). You'll still need to change your IDE settings, but this way you can keep the muscle-memory for the shortcut.


It's not possible to disable Ctrl+Click at a system-wide level. You have two options: use Command+Click which is the de facto standard in all the Mac IDEs (which would be my suggestion, since going against such a well-established OS convention brings more headaches than it's worth), or configure your IDE to disable the shortcut: as you have noticed, remote desktop and virtualization environments offer the possibility.