arctor
if you're just learning Houdini I would really recommend not trying to make Houdini behave the same as another app you're more familiar with…

This quote from a Houdini employee is very alerting. Not a very “user centric” attitude, is it? There are hundreds of post from users all complaining that they can't use the Houdini navigation. “A Lamborghini without a steering wheel”. Exactly! This issue has existed for years. Why not just fix the issue in Houdini and be done with it? It is 2017, and many computers ship with a mouse that have no MMB. Many users are using tablets with only two buttons, that have to be mapped to panning, RMB, radial menus etc. Hardcoding navigation to MMB is ridiculous!

If anyone needs to use the environment variable approach, you can put “HOUDINI_MMB_PAN = 0” in your houdini.env file.
That way, RMB will pan; you can dolly using MMB (if you have one), the scroll wheel, or the equivalent touchpad gesture (e.g. two-finger swipe to scroll).

In my experience, 1 is the default value for HOUDINI_MMB_PAN (even in v16.5), so manually setting it to 1 will not change anything.

JW

P.S. IMHO, the best “solution” for laptop users is a Logitech M570 trackball. It's bulky, yes, but inexpensive, lightweight, gets good battery life, and works much better than a touchpad (or mouse, for that matter, again IMHO).

Since this thread has been revived, I will say that I agree with what gyltefors said over a year ago. At the very least, I hope Houdini 17 has the option to disable the mouse pan in the Preferences without having to go and modify the houdini.env document.

Things like these seem simple and obviously very requested for SESI not to address once and for all. Thank you SESI for allowing me to create an incredibly detailed nuclear explosion in the middle of an ocean…now can I pretty please use my trackpad with your product?

If you're not using a three button SGI mouse, you're not a real™ Houdini user.