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Age Old OSX Question: Mouse Acceleration

M

Member2010

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 28, 2013
144
7
As long as I've used OSX (close to a year now), something always seems to have been off about it. I finally figured out what the problem is though, and that is the mouse acceleration. As a Windows user first, I've become accustomed to the natural feeling mouse acceleration that is enabled in it by default, so the obnoxious "super slow-mo" mode that is activated when you slow the mouse down even a little bit is extremely annoying (in fact, I now know why keyboard shortcuts are so popular among the OSX users' community!). I've discovered the same issue while scrolling, on a webpage for example.

I've spent hours searching for a solution, but came up mostly empty handed (except for a software that requires 10.6). Does anyone here know of a PPC OSX compatible solution to restore a more natural, Windows-like mouse acceleration to the software?

Thanks.

:M2010
 
Member2010 said:
As long as I've used OSX (close to a year now), something always seems to have been off about it. I finally figured out what the problem is though, and that is the mouse acceleration. As a Windows user first, I've become accustomed to the natural feeling mouse acceleration that is enabled in it by default, so the obnoxious "super slow-mo" mode that is activated when you slow the mouse down even a little bit is extremely annoying (in fact, I now know why keyboard shortcuts are so popular among the OSX users' community!). I've discovered the same issue while scrolling, on a webpage for example.

I've spent hours searching for a solution, but came up mostly empty handed (except for a software that requires 10.6). Does anyone here know of a PPC OSX compatible solution to restore a more natural, Windows-like mouse acceleration to the software?

Thanks.

:M2010
Click to expand...
Mousezoom. Been using it since 2005 with 10.3.
 

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mouse reply

Interesting. Unfortunately, it seems to do almost the same thing as the "mouse acceleration" preferences addon that I installed before, and while it helps a little bit, precise mouse movements are still difficult. Is there anything else?

::
 
What exactly are you looking for?

MouseZoom accelerates the mouse cursor. You have to play with the accel factor so that it's not so high that you overshoot a target you wish to click on, but not so slow you have to push the mouse hard to get there.

It takes a bit of dialing in to find that.

There's a system preference out there (or app) that will automatically snap your mouse right on top of a clickable dialogue button (the default one) if that's something you are meaning. I'd have to track that one down though as I can't recall it from memory right now. But I didn't use that one much because it takes over the mouse when I didn't want it to sometimes.
 
stumper

eyoungren said:
What exactly are you looking for?
Click to expand...

I'm just looking for the natural feeling mouse acceleration in Windows. Using the software tweaks I've discovered up to this point, the mouse works just fine when moving it at a fast rate of speed, it's when you slow down that OSX slows the pointer down to rididculously-obnoxiously slow speeds (Unlike Windows or Ubuntu, which will just slow it down proportionately) (the scrollbar in any web browser will exhibit the same behavior - scroll five-ten "clicks" slowly, then very quickly, you'll find that the difference of speed is almost exponential). Here's a fun exercise I came up with to test this that anyone can do:

1. Open firefox and locate the search bar. Get a stopwatch and get it ready to time this exercise:

2. As quickly as you can, click the dropdown to select the search engine closest to the top of the list.

2. Click the dropdown again and select the next one down.

3. Repeat the process until you're about at the sixth or seventh one, then halt your stopwatch (get multiple timings performing the same "precise clicking" task to get a consistent average; what you do doesn't really matter, you just want to make sure you're doing the same set of steps across your tests). Now perform the exact same task on a Windows or Ubuntu computer with mouse acceleration enabled, and compare your timings. I found that my Windows laptop's trackpad was over 20% faster than an actual mouse on the OSX computer, and I haven't even tested it with an actual mouse yet!

There's a system preference out there (or app) that will automatically snap your mouse right on top of a clickable dialogue button (the default one) if that's something you are meaning. I'd have to track that one down though as I can't recall it from memory right now. But I didn't use that one much because it takes over the mouse when I didn't want it to sometimes.
Click to expand...

No thanks. I used to have that enabled in Windows, but wasn't a huge fan of it either.

harrymatic said:
I use a Microsoft Intellimouse, and I had to install the IntelliPoint preference panel to get it accurately tracking. The software may work with other mice though, so it's worth a go... http://download.microsoft.com/downl...-B05E-A977EA5E75C9/Microsoft-Mouse-X-d235.dmg
Click to expand...

This too looked promising, but no dice for it either. Seems to do the same thing as the prior 2 control panel plugins.

::
 
I still don't understand, what you are searching for?

Do you mean the speed, when you move the cursor over the screen from one the left to the right?

In the system preferences you can choose how fast the cursor should follow your finger on the trackpad.
 
When I switched the company I run from windows to all Mac a few years back, this was a big issue. I have grown accustomed to it since I have used Macs for so long and do not realize how it affects those who may have been used to something else. Some of them are using tweaks or apps to help get them up and running. But they all say the same thing, "When I slow the mouse pointer down to be precise, it slows down too much and it feels unnatural".

Some of them have also been cured by trying out different mice, but that can become expensive. But it always seems to be there for them until they get used to it.

Sorry I didn't offer any actual help ;) I'm old.... I'll use that as my excuse.
 
I know the pointer in OS X tends to slow down with your finger, rather than remain the same constant speed from start to finish, if that's what you mean. Personally, I think it feels more natural and relaxed.

But even if you don't care for it, it's fairly subtle difference, isn't it? I just don't quite grasp how it could be such an issue.
 
Cox Orange said:
I still don't understand, what you are searching for?

Do you mean the speed, when you move the cursor over the screen from one the left to the right?

In the system preferences you can choose how fast the cursor should follow your finger on the trackpad.
Click to expand...

I'm not using a trackpad with my G5 - I'm having enough trouble with a mouse! If you still can't understand, see post number 7.

JaguarGod said:
When I switched the company I run from windows to all Mac a few years back, this was a big issue. I have grown accustomed to it since I have used Macs for so long and do not realize how it affects those who may have been used to something else. Some of them are using tweaks or apps to help get them up and running. But they all say the same thing, "When I slow the mouse pointer down to be precise, it slows down too much and it feels unnatural".

Some of them have also been cured by trying out different mice, but that can become expensive. But it always seems to be there for them until they get used to it.

Sorry I didn't offer any actual help ;) I'm old.... I'll use that as my excuse.
Click to expand...

That's okay. It's just sad that this otherwise semi-useful computer is crippled by such terrible software.

SkyBell said:
I know the pointer in OS X tends to slow down with your finger, rather than remain the same constant speed from start to finish, if that's what you mean. Personally, I think it feels more natural and relaxed.

But even if you don't care for it, it's fairly subtle difference, isn't it? I just don't quite grasp how it could be such an issue.
Click to expand...

It is anything but subtle. When my Windows computer's TRACKPAD is faster to use for precision tasks than an actual mouse hooked up to an OSX computer (by a large margin, I might add), that goes one step beyond "subtle". In fact, the horribly tiny trackpad on my Windows netbook was faster than that mouse on OSX. If you'd like to enumerate the true inefficiency of OSX's obnoxious mouse acceleration for yourself, head over to post 7 and try the precision pointing exercise described there, the results might surprise you.
 
mighty

AmestrisXServe said:
As I recall, MightyMouse added a whopping plethora of mouse prefs, including acceleration, and pointer changing.
Click to expand...

Unless there's another "MightyMouse" that I haven't tried, it appears that that just lets you change and/or magnify your pointer, which can be useful and cool, but doesn't seem to be able to help with mouse acceleration.
 
Member2010 said:
Unless there's another "MightyMouse" that I haven't tried, it appears that that just lets you change and/or magnify your pointer, which can be useful and cool, but doesn't seem to be able to help with mouse acceleration.
Click to expand...


Hmm... Something that I had on 10.3 allowed me to change these settings, and I thought that was it. I must have had another preference pane for this kind of function, that once I set, i never again changed.

I know that I used it for custom pointers, as my vision is bad, and it was nice to have a large, contrasting pointer, but I thought that it did more than this.

Go with what is known to work.
 
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