Discussion on: What mouse do you use?

I use a Swiftpoint Z. A large part of why I chose it is that I happened to be looking for a replacement for my failing Logitech G600 at the same time that their Kickstarter campaign was running, but I would probably have picked it anyway.

Major benefits in my opinion:

• It's reasonably ergonomic without sacrificing functionality.
• It's programmable to a level that makes Logitech and Razer gaming mice look pathetic by comparison. You can do complex looping macros with multi-button chording conditions, among other things.
• It's truly programmable, not runtime configurable. All your button mappings and macros get saved to the mouse itself, and they just work no matter where you plug it in without needing any of the configuration software.
• Some of the buttons have pressure sensors built in, and you can set trip points to do different things depending on how hard you press the button. For example, on the main left button, I have things set up so that if I hold it down with about twice the pressure required to just click it, it will fire click events as fast as the system can process them (really useful in FPS games because it lets you fire semi-auto weapons as fast as the game will allow).
• The button configuration clusters things in a way that actually makes sense. Of the 13 buttons, 9 are handled in an intuitive way with just the index and middle fingers, two are offset still intuitively for the index finger, and two are thumb buttons.
• The mouse itself includes a 6DOF motion sensor, and you can bind inputs to the rotational and translation axes of that. The big thing they market about this is the ability to tilt the mouse to do things, and it's wonderful (I use this for sensor resolution switching myself, but there are all kinds of things you can do with it).
• In addition to the usual pointing device and keyboard endpoints most gaming mice expose, the Z also exposes a gamepad endpoint, and you can map buttons and other inputs to controls on a simulated gamepad/joystick. This includes direct analog mapping of the 6DOF motion sensor inputs to analog inputs for the simulated gamepad.

It does, however, have a few downsides:

• No infinite scrolling. It uses a 'standard' clicky scroll wheel instead of a free-spinning one using an optical encoder. This is mostly personal preference (I actually like it better this way), but I feel it's worth pointing out.
• It's expensive. Like, seriously expensive. IMO, it's worth the price, but for some people it may not be.
• Despite it saving configuration to the mouse, there's no way to pull configuration off of the mouse.