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I am using macOS 10.15.4 "Catalina", and intermittently my mouse right click starts behaving like a mouse left click; i.e. no matter how I configure my mouse, I cannot get the right click (secondary button) behaviour. It is an Apple USB non-cordless mouse; the Mac came with a cordless mouse but that died.

It usually comes good after unplugging and replugging the mouse from the USB port, a few times.

It is possibly a hardware issue, but if it is, why does right-clicking do anything at all?

Probably the only "uncommon" way I use my Mac is I leave the emacs editor constantly running; emacs is a huge program and I guess there is a chance it is doing something strange.

Is this a known issue? Or does it sound like a hardware issue?

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    Possibly of relevance: apple.stackexchange.com/questions/329286/…
    – Peter B
    Commented Nov 12, 2020 at 2:52
  • I lean to the view that this is a hardware issue. Have you had a change to use the mouse with another computer? If the mouse behaves like it does with your Mac, the culprit is definitely the mouse. Could you test it and report back?
    – jaume
    Commented Nov 25, 2020 at 15:44
  • Have you checked if the answer in the article you mention in your comment is relevant to you?
    – jaume
    Commented Nov 25, 2020 at 15:46
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    @jaume You were right, it is a hardware issue, albeit a strange one. After several days of no problems, it went bad today. So I plugged it into my wife's Windows laptop, and it misbehaved there too: both left and right clicks behaved like clicking the middle button (unused on Mac OS). It came good after a few minutes, but it is time to get a new mouse!
    – Peter B
    Commented Nov 30, 2020 at 22:04
  • Thank you for coming back to me, great the mystery is solved :-) Any chance you would be willing to rewrite your comment into a answer? That will help others with a similar issue. You can then mark your answer as accepted, so that the question appears as solved.
    – jaume
    Commented Dec 1, 2020 at 7:06

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In fact it was a hardware issue. I confirmed this by waiting for the behaviour to reappear, then plugging the mouse into a different computer. (See comments below the question).

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