Global scroll acceleration in Windows

Question

Is there a way to add smoothing and acceleration to scrolling in Windows. Cruising through pages by scrolling faster beats having to scroll a hundred times, and is the default behaviour of the mouse scroll in Mac OS X.

I am aware that there are specialised mice that are capable of this, but there are also software methods to do achieve this for example Chromium Wheel Smooth Scroller.

Is there a program to apply a Windows wide scrolling behaviour.

Notes: running Windows 7.

Answer 1

You can change the number of lines to be scrolled per notch on the wheel:

(3 lines is default setting, 100 is the maximum)

Here's a little shareware utility ($10) that might be worth looking at:

ScrollNavigator also adds dynamic acceleration to your mouse wheel. This indispensable feature makes mouse wheel scrolling more accurate when you turn the wheel slowly, and it scrolls your documents much faster when you turn the wheel quickly.

Answer 2

Installing Microsoft Mouse for any mouse (I usually use the basic Intellimouse) provide a new setting in the Mouse control panel that allows you to set the scroll wheel to accelerating rather than N lines.

Answer 3

Install autohotkey and run the following script with it:

#InstallMouseHook

~WheelUp::
if (A_TimeSincePriorHotkey > 15)
{
    return
}
Send {PgUp}
return

~WheelDown::
if (A_TimeSincePriorHotkey > 15)
{
    return
}
Send {PgDn}
return

What it does is if a "wheel up" event is triggered it lets it through to the active window (~ prefix) and if the following trigger happens within 15ms (double "wheel up") it sends a "page up" to the active window. Same for "wheel down". Side effects: the cursor will be moved when "page up" is triggered (naturally), and it doesn't work if you are editing a text field, say, in a browser ("page up" is lost in the field, so the main window is not "paged up").

Autohotkey is an amazing software with rich scripting capabilities, look through documentation - there could be more tweaks you could do to Windows such as minimize a window on double escape:

~Esc::
if (A_PriorHotkey <> "~Esc" or A_TimeSincePriorHotkey > 400)
{
    ; Too much time between presses, so this isn't a double-press.
    KeyWait, Esc
    return
}
WinMinimize, A
return

Good luck.