Making horizontal touchpad scrolling less “aggressive”

Question

When I want to scroll up or down in a document on my Mac using the touchpad, and the document in question is not only taller than the viewport, but also wider, I constantly find myself having unintentionally scrolled to the right as well as up or down. I then have to correct the scrolling by scrolling to the left. This does not only make the UI seem "flimsy", it's also very frustrating.

Is there any way to keep my two-finger scrolling but make OS X less sensitive to the horizontal movements when doing vertical scrolling — like a threshold or something that has to be crossed for horizontal scrolling to take place when the movement is mainly vertical and vice versa?

TIA :)

Daniel

Answer 1

On my iBook running Leopard I have an option under system-preferences-trackpad to allow horizontal scrolling as a checkbox.

I am led to believe that some mouse options have changed in snow leopard, and a third party app is available to allow some customisation here.

Posts by user "Chris CA" in this apple forum post suggest the following steps to reduce mouse acceleration: "System prefs > Mouse Set Tracking all the way to the left"

He/She then goes on to point to the "Mac OS X reference library - XSET" detailing the mouse parameters 'threshold' and 'acceleration'.