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The mouse acceleration on Mac OS X is driving me nuts. It may work for touchpads but nothing beats the Windows' acceleration curves. Is there a way to modify the behaviour on OS X? I tried getting a Microsoft mouse driver for OS X but it didn't work since my mouse is not from Microsoft.

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8 Answers

up vote 17 down vote accepted

Take a look at Mouse Acceleration Preference Pane.

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Nice to see a free Mac app. Also tried steermouse but didn't find an ideal program for this to be honest. I think Apple really should copy the MS Windows acceleration algorithm. – TomA Jul 21 '09 at 19:18
Although I'm a new Mac user, I've read that it was more like Windows in OS 9 and earlier. For some reason they thought it would be helpful to have this bizarre scheme in OS X. Still, we are talking about a company that thinks the Mighty Mouse is a good idea - even most Mac fanatics hate that! – U62 Aug 25 '09 at 14:44
This now works with Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. – Schnapple Feb 25 '10 at 6:04
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Yes, it works on Snow Leapard - without acceleration, defeating the purpose of the program. -1 for wasting my time. – amateur barista May 7 '11 at 2:15
Had the same problem especially when gaming Quake Live. Installed this app, killed the acceleration.. Winning! – Phliplip Jun 28 '11 at 5:48
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up vote 8 down vote

Try ControllerMate.

enter image description here

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This is the most unusable program I've used in my life. The interface is so bloated (it looks almost like Photoshop), that I never was able to open the acceleration settings. -1 for wasting my time. – amateur barista May 7 '11 at 2:16
up vote 7 down vote

To turn off mouse acceleration entirely, run the following in the terminal:

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

This made it feel pretty Windows-y to me. Love Apple's trackpads, but the mouse settings are full of fail.

To turn mouse acceleration back on, change anything in the mouse preference pane, or run the command again with 1 instead of -1.

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I think this is ok if you only have a one, smaller display. With multiple big displays you really need some sort of acceleration. – studgeek Jul 7 '12 at 23:42
up vote 4 down vote

I may sound extreme, but I connect my mouse to a small, quiet, Windows laptop and use synergy with the mac as a client. This works well for me.

None, and I repeat, none (I've tried all of them) of the available OS X mouse mods out there actually get your mouse to behave like it does on Windows. They just get you a little closer. Furthermore, regardless of the acceleration curve, OS X has a defect that causes many mice to make erratic jumping movements (apparently this is fixed in OSX Lion...) and no available software (except for OSX Lion) addresses it.

Synergy is not a great solution, but it is a solution. In particular you should not run it over wifi and instead use as direct of an ethernet connection as possible to reduce the latency. Also a bummer is that sometimes my cursor disappears, and I have to switch apps with cmd+tab in order to restore it.

As much as a perfectionist as Steve Jobs was, the cursor tracking on OS X unfortunately eluded his attention. The only solution is to actually use Windows, hence synergy.

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+1 on the perfectionist note. MS wins this one. – TomA Oct 30 '11 at 1:44
A very creative approach :). – studgeek Dec 13 '12 at 20:51
up vote 3 down vote

I've been looking for a solution for OSX 10.6, and haven't found one yet. I find the acceleration curve far too sharp - it's fine for quickly navigating to objects far away, but extremely slow for something fine grained like drawing a line or clicking a series of items a shortish distance from each other.

Yes, you can disable acceleration completely, but that's pretty unusable on a big display. I tried Mouse Acceleration Preference Pane and a couple of others, but ever since mac removed the acceleration API in 10.6, they don't have any workarounds.

It's such a pain :(

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This isn't an answer, as much as it sums up how I feel. – Django Reinhardt Mar 5 '12 at 15:40
up vote 3 down vote

Try SteerMouse

Don't be put off by the slightly naff website, this is the best one I've found available for Lion. You can download a trial - definitely worth a purchase though.

Just set the tracking speed to 0 and set the sensitivity to whatever feels normal for your mouse.

enter image description here

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up vote 3 down vote

Another new option is SmoothMouse. Its work on Mountain Lion and supports the Magic Mouse. Some folks are quite happy with it (discussion). I'm personally still deciding (but already think its better than standard OSX).

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up vote 0 down vote

The command line version of mousefix/iMouseFix continues to work for me on 10.8 (also worked on 10.7 and 10.6) with the Apple MagicMouse and MacBook trackpad (some of the other suggested solutions don't work for the MagicMouse).

I can quickly move the mouse between displays, but also do fine work with a setting of 3.5 on 10.8 and 8 on 10.6.

To use download mousefix.tbz2 from http://code.google.com/p/mousefix-10-6/downloads/list. Then run it on the command line:

mousefix 8

Once you have the right setting, just added it to your ~/.profile as they suggest in the README

FYI, The binary download is mousefix.tbz2 at http://code.google.com/p/mousefix-10-6/downloads/list.

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protected by Diago Dec 4 '10 at 21:12

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