Boldface added.

According to searches, this is not possible with the default interface. Is there a mod that allows you to do this internally to WoW (i.e., so I don't have to reconfigure all this next time I get a new mouse)? Or do you basically have to use hardware-specific utilities?

Somebody mentioned this earlier (quote below). Similar to how there is not a function for the G15 Keyboard's Macro keys - you use the software provided by the mouse (or keyboard) to get the button to activate an obscure keyboard combination which you can enter into the keybindings menu in WoW.

I wont post all my keybindings here, as it seems a bit pointless, just a few things i already use:
1) WASD for movement, ESDF layout puts my hand into strain for some reason when i try to reach modifiers, especially Alt.
2) keys 123456tgbzxc + Alt, Shift, Ctrl modifiers
3) only frequent ( Shadowbolt !) and emergency abilities ( trinket, HS/Pot ) bound without modifiers or to some easy to reach even with modifiers keys ( t , g, c ). After 2+ years of raiding and pvp i can certainly state that it is a "good thing" to do.
4) Bartender3 with "Dynamic Page Swapping on Modifier Down", it freed heck a lot space, although i shall press modifier to see whether ability is in range / on cd.

And some things for future
1) buy a decent headset and setup voice activation, frees one key, but that's worth it, i think. ( Now i have Plantronics Voyager 855 headset, works like a charm )
2) rebind instant ablities to mouse and thumb-accessible keys to be able to move forward/strafe with index, middle and ring fingers. That needs a lot of testing, though.
3) i don't want all those Mod+key combinations to do something with my focus/party target. Also i don't want clunky macros that do complex things like "devour myself and then my target and then targettarget". Can one use two modifiers at once ? What about using pedals to specify focus or mouseover target ? Seems like a very convenient way to do that.

I'm quite amazed by the number of people who are using their keyboard to turn and click abilities. It just doesn't seem quick enough to me, but I guess if you're used to it - it's easy.
As for me, the only thing I doesn't have keybound is manapot, being a shadowpriest I barely use it.
Using numpad for buffing (or basically, when I don't need to use my mouse to turn or change targets and such).
Shift being the most used modifier for different spells/pots/trinkets.

To elaborate on Soralin's post, if you're using a Logitech or Microsoft mouse, for example, there's going to be a mouse icon in your system tray down in the right side of your task bar. Or go to the Mouse configuration via the Control panel.

There'll be an interface in there that will allow you to set keys or programs to your various mouse buttons.

We're not interested in your keybindings, unless to address something very specific to a part of the thread discussion.

Any reply that has a lot of bindings (we get to decide what constitutes "a lot") will be infracted and shitcanned.

I do the same. I very occasionally want to have just one bag open to not clutter up my whole screen, but it's rare enough that it's best just to do "B" to open all, then manually close the ones I don't want by clicking.

Running a mod like simple action sets helps for this sort of thing. When you respec you're going to rebind your keys anyway (at least you should) and this should help with ease and consistency. It's also handy for people who indulge in the odd spot of account sharing to fill raid gaps in terms of not messing up other peoples binds.

Since I am loath to take my hand of the mouse I am always searching for one with as many buttons as possible. Being a shadowpriest, I have a fair amount of skills that I want to fit on it too. The mouse I found that had the biggest amount of buttons was the Razer Lachesis. (2 regular, 2 on each side, mousewheel + 2 more on top = 9 buttons.)

Originally I couldn't manage to bind the top two buttons to a skill in WoW, since they stayed bound to dpi sensitivity settings. But after fiddling with the setup application in windows (I run wow on a mac, but the lachesis setup only runs on windows) I managed to bind the dpi buttons to regular characters instead. So, with shift-key I now have all the skills I need right there on my mouse.

(Mac users need the Steermouse shareware app to make it work.)

I searched the -for me, most effective way to combine as many possible actions with as few as possible buttons.

I think its a very subjective and classbased toppic.

So, my 2 Cents I can add to this which I think might be worth a consideration:
I solved getting many, many actions fit under "a few" buttons instead of dancing over the keyboard, by a mixture of a 5 button mouse, a keypad (I think such is subjective preferance and not a necessity) and a "good" action bar addon. (Trinity 2.0)

Being able to use the same -say 5 keybindings for up to X Actions without having to press shift/strg/Alt/whatever,
opens you already many possibilities.
This is done by using the various ways Trinity can interact with Stances and Situations, far beyond the Stancedance and Stealth change only. Theres a wide array available and the most enjoyable factor is, as soon as the action bar fades out (either by a specified situation occuring or by a keypress) the very same keybindings can be used for another action bar.
And you still have STRG, Alt or Ahift as joker in your backhand. Also, you can assign keybindings with 2 clicks and have a solid Addon UI for changing Trinity as you wish.

Baseline
I think, having a flexible ingame addon is the foundation for a stressless keybinding, however you desire it to be.
Its the addon which allows me not having to rely on all keys on my keyboard, but being able to focus on a manageable
amount of buttons to trigger in a short time. Things like Gamepad or Mouse are everyones own choice, but I believe they can profit aswell from a good addon.

I've keybound most things in a pretty standard fashion which I won't iterate here. Three things that have worked well for me as a warrior tank, beyond the usual, are:

1. Binding walk backwards to shift-s. Once you've started the walk backwards you don't need to keep shift depressed, so you have the functionality of 4 movement keys in Q-E
2. Using the mousewheel for shield block and heroic strike. It has been easier on my brain timing the global cooldown abilities with one hand, and selecting these as needed with the other. Mousebuttons would be equally good I'd imagine.
3. Using 1-3 on stance bars for stance swopping and key ability in that stance (1=battle or mocking, 2=def or taunt, 3=zerker or berserker rage) and other stance specific abilities on the low numbered stance bar slots.

I think all three may have come from suggestions made previously on these forums. I apologise that I can't link the original posts, its been months or years since I saw them if they were.

Edit: Some of the above came from the discussion in the protection warrior thread from this post onwards: http://elitistjerks.com/584641-post403.html

Listing some of your keybinds -- if you're explaining exactly why you're doing them in this certain way and what advantage you think it conveys -- is acceptable. We don't really want a long list of everyone popping in "Hi guys, first time poster, I bind 2 to shadowbolt and I think it's awesome..."

This is really more of a high level discussion about bindings in general, the thought behind them, little ways to make things easier, and so on.

I'd argue that this thread has turned into the generalization of the author's original question. Namely:

Keybinding tips and tricks that help you activate more abilities faster

The crucial point is that the ability bound to a particular key sequence is irrelevant. No one cares if you bound Q to cleanse, as that doesn't help people activate more abilities. It's taken as a given that Q was bound to some useful ability. What IS useful (at least from my point of view) are easily accessible chording sequences. For example, control + spacebar was something I'd never thought of and it seems generally useful for an ability you need to press infrequently, relatively quickly but not super quickly, and not in conjunction with other abilities. Sounds good for using a mount or a daily quest item, but there are many possibilities. I also liked the idea about binding ctrl/alt/shift to auxiliary mouse buttons using an external program, as that greatly expands the number of key presses available. I'll probably look into that one as well.

At any rate, my impression is that this thread is about which novel keys you bind things to, NOT what abilities you bound.

I think that's fine.

A word to the wise: My experience with "the rules" on this board is that they all basically boil down to "don't waste people's time". If you just keep in the back of your mind the question "Hey, are people going to want to read this stuff I'm typing?" then you'll be fine.

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Does anyone else find their middle mouse button behaving unreliably? I've had mine bound to Cleanse for awhile, and I find often I have to mash it multiple times to get it to do anything. (This is one of those middle mouse buttons that's also a scroll wheel and a left-right switch.)

I've noticed this. In the past I've chalked it up to Grid acting screwy or myself clipping the end of the GCD, but it's possible it's a mouse problem. My mouse (Logitech LX8) has a scroll-wheel/h-scroll/button thing like yours.

I have one of the logitech Mice with 2 thumb buttons I think they get mapped as Mouse4 and Mouse5.

I have tried many different bindings to these but found that these buttons work exceedingly well for reactionary abilities such as PVP Trinket, WotF, Kick/Counterspell etc. The reasoning being that it costs me nothing to have my Right thumb ready to hit one of these instantly. Previously I think I had Earth Shock and Counterspell bound to 4 which is a pretty accessible key but still needed me to move my hand from default position. Any twitch bindings you can unload onto your mouse hand will help you out.

I've done the ESDF move a long time ago on my holy paladin placing the lesser used skills such as damage immediately to the right of movement. I found that using them is not as comfortable while moving as anything to left/above/below - this could just be me though.

A lot of people rebound the forward key to something and use something else to run, I tried that for a while and it's not for me. I would highly recommend binding anything else to backpedal as it's the quickest way to get you out of that horrible habbit. On top of that it's the best key from position point of view - I have hamstring there on my warrior.

I use the shift modifier freely, especially on my paladin as the skillset supports that with long cooldowns and mutually exclusive if similar skills - like blessing of sacrifice and blessing of protection, I have the former on R and the latter on SHIFT+R. Normal and raid blessings fall into this nicely with wisdom at 5 and raid wisdom at SHIFT+5 for example. Or different ranks of heals, but that's going away on Tue so it's not that important. As such unbinding SHIFT+SPACE was necessary. CTRL modifier is for far more situational or lesser used stuff like turn undead, LoH, ressurect, etc - I can still press these very quickly but it's very unlikely I'll press them accidentally. Keep in mind that any cast time abilities could naturally bind to movement keys with a modifier.

You need to identify your most important spells for each class, give them priority as to what needs to be a very fast reaction and comfortable key and what wouldn't be much of a concern. This isn't necessarily your most used spells - for example on my paladin I had heals bound above movement which I consider second most comfortable with immediate right being first. This is because heals are casted. I imagine for a shaman tremor and grounding totems are key but other totems not so much.

Eventually I rebound everything down to professions, bags, itemrack setups and such. All in all 68 keybinds on my paladin. Not so much on the warrior as I'm making far more use out of the macro system. Which leaves me with some constrictions - like presently I cannot intercept if I'm out of combat - but overall very natural flow of play.

EDIT: I should add that I do not use action bars at all. Everything I ever use in combat is bound and I use a mod to track cooldowns. Anything not bound I don't use. I currently use TrinityBars to bind stuff right out of spell book, but I'm not too happy with it. I'm probably going to switch to BindPad after the patch if it works. The interface looks more clumsy than trinity but trinity is buggy and sometimes straight up fails. I used SpellBinder when I played my paladin exclusively but it doesn't appear to have profile support.

I've seen a lot of people post recommended mouses, does anyone recommend a left handed mouse? All the mouse I've checked out were either neutral or right handed mouses.

For what it's worth, I discovered Macaroon today, which is a new project from the author of Trinity, apparently a mix of recycled code and new stuff. I've been playing around with it today (designed a new interface and spent a few hours soloing elites to get the hang of it) and not noticed any bugs. Only works for 3.0. (I used it on the beta; author says it works on the PTR as well.)

Macaroon Xtras is also worth grabbing if you try Macaroon.

[e]:

Since I'm still at the end of the thread, one point I've discovered about Macaroon is that it doesn't play well with the vehicle controls in WotLK. Vehicles use the hotkeys assigned to the main Blizz interface bar (1-6 by default) and if you've remapped these keys you won't be able to use them while driving vehicles. A workaround is to just leave 1-6 bound normally and use standard macros/ability-slotting in those for whatever you want to bind them to.

Also, the vehicle interface will not appear if you have "Hide main Blizzard bar" checked in the Macaroon options, so you'll have to either play with the main bar showing, or switch it on and off when you use a vehicle.

Didn't see this kind of setup mentioned in the thread so I'll introduce mine:

I have a G15 keyboard, the older model with blue backlight and 18 G-keys. For mouse I have Logitech MX1000 which has 3 thumb buttons, mousewheel tilt and buttons above and below the mousescroll.

In my setup I use only mouse for movement. Small thumb is forward, large is back. Wheel tilt buttons are strafe left and right. The above mousewheel button is auto-run and below mousewheel button is mount macro. Alt tabbing is Ctrl-mousewheel.

This leaves all the G-keys for combat keybinds which I can reach easily, I rest my hand on the middle cluster of keys and my main nuke is on the index-finger key. With thumb I can press Ctrl for more combos but that isn't so necessary and I only used it for downranking Frost bolt, Blizzard or Arcane Explosion. While playing I don't have to lift my hands from their initial position unless I chat.

I haven't bound the middle thumb button from mouse as I noticed it can be accidentally pushed while moving - it's really small. The added benefit of G15 keyboard is there's a manual switch to disable the Windows-keys.

Learning the mouse movement took it's time but I'm happy with the setup now. For key-bindings I've been using Spellbinder addon. My main is a mage but with alt's I aim for same idea - middle cluster of G-keys is for the most used combat abilities, the top and bottom rows are for escape and shields and so on.

I think its a better idea to keybind your most important abilities in the most convinient places (i.e. the keys right next to your movement keys) rather than the most used as this allows you to react faster (well, put your reaction into action). i.e. with wasd config you can press c much faster than say 6. That is definitely more of a pvp thing though because in pve you rarely have to react all that fast if you're standing in the right spot.

I tried using my mousewheel as a button during the SSC days and just couldn't stand how unreliable it was. It appears to be a combination of the fact that the wheel itself turns (giving necessity to locating your finger in the exact center to avoid rotating or tilting) and that it takes more force to depress it since the button is designed to rotate.

But on the flip side I also have tilt left, tilt right, rotate up and rotate down as bindables and I want to make sure an ability goes off without accidentally depressing the button underneath and doing something else instead. I'd kill for a mouse with a lockable scrollwheel, but I'm not an expert on peripheral engineering so I'm not sure if that's even feasible