I try other Mouses but always return to the Apple products.
Trying to get other Mouses to have the same acceleration and tracking as you he Magic Mouse eludes me!
The thing with the Magic Mouse is the touch sensor on top! Being able to swipe and scroll horizontally and vertically is so ingrained that I miss it when switching.
Adding a TouchID sensor to the side of the Apple Magic Mouse would be super useful!
I don’t have a Magic Keyboard with TouchID yet, so I’m constantly reaching over to MacBook keyboard. I feel like if my thumb could just connect with the TouchID sensor on the side of a Magic Mouse, there’s be a lot less friction in the security UI!
I’m inspired to also try a trackpad given the enthusiasm shown in the comments here!
The magic mouse is the worst mouse I have used so far, precisely because of the touch area. I tried for a while to adapt to it and developed severe RSI. I event went through the “I must be holding it wrong” pattern like the apple fanboy I am, to no avail. I suspect it comes down to me having the wrong shape of hand. Luckily logitech makes some excellent mice, and I can map the thumb buttons to the gestures I used most on the magic mouse.
I've always liked the Magic Mouse.
> The thing with the Magic Mouse is the touch sensor on top! Being able to swipe and scroll horizontally and vertically
This is such an underrated feature; I use it constantly.
But there's more it can do; Better Touch Tool lets you configure gestures to your heart's content [1].
[1]: https://folivora.ai
- you can't rest your fingers on it. When you use it, you have to keep your finger(s) raised
- if an app/game uses middle button, you can't use that
I rest my fingers on the surface all the time and it's fine?
----
I'm also one of the dozen that like the Magic Mouse; in fact I have the first gen one that takes AA batteries, and it's still working perfectly. It's now the oldest mouse I've owned and used. Prior to it I think I had an early model of the wired optical IntelliMouse.
I do rest my index finger on the edge, and I do sometimes get a false micro/jerky scroll movement!
(Sorry, but I can't stand Apple hardware... I find it very crappy)
Would you mind expanding on that? I'm not sure what I'd improve about my touchpad experience on my Mac.
IMO there’s no objective reason why. Natural scrolling is not what a lot of people are used to with a mouse, but it’s perfectly usable and even more consistent if you’re using the Magic Mouse, which uses a touch surface instead of a mechanical wheel. I, for example, always make my Windows and Linux machine use natural scrolling like I’m used to from my Mac and my life isn’t any better or worse because of it.
I'm the opposite - I was surprised by how much of an improvement I found natural scrolling after decades of computer use. I now use an autohotkey script when on windows to get the same behavior as I get on macOS.
I can certainly see the switching cost not being worth it and wanting a setting that applies to the mouse and not the touchpad, but I'm failing to see how it's anything other than a switching cost.
The first couple of seconds using it differently are confusing, then _click_, brain switches over.
Maybe this only happens if you regularly need to use different machines.
When I use someone else’s computer that uses the old scroll direction it just seems clunky and artificial.
Acceleration doesn’t really have a place on touchpads since they became ‘perfect’ with near-zero deadzone ~10 years ago. Especially on a nice big touchpad with equal click pressure like MacBooks have
Sure MacOS' stock behavior might be fine for you, but that's a different conversation, we're talking about giving the user choice without resorting to hacks here.
Within the last 5 years this wasn’t always the case since that’s when I last setup a Windows machine and this definitely was not a setting and I had to edit the registry. Trust me that was not my first choice—I would have much rather used a setting like you can on macOS for scroll direction.
Of course that’s not to say macOS is perfect either. Sounds like they are just now getting around to adding a setting for mouse acceleration. Now, this has always been possible with a “simple” (when compared to the multiple registry edits I had to do on Windows) terminal command—no need to resort to a an additional utility as you imply. Obviously both of these “hacks” as you say are not anything regular consumers are going to be able to do.
With all that said, macOS is closer aligned to how I would do an OS “out of the box”.
- yabai/skhd for window management
- brew/mas for package management
- linearmouse to disable cursor acceleration, scroll acceleration, and inverted scroll direction for mice while keeping all those things on for trackpads.
There are other things that I install on my Macs, but these are the programs that I use to fix behavior that I find unacceptable. Additionally I maintain a script of about 50 `defaults write ...` commands so that I don't have to dig around in the settings menus of system applications to configure them to behave sanely (show file extensions and paths, don't reorder Spaces, disable autocorrect, etc).
These are all apps for which I have long-standing muscle memory. If I use a new computer, I'm still pressing the keys but nothing happens and I have to remember how to do the things the normal way.
[1] https://cleanshot.com [2] https://highlyopinionated.co/swish/
I wish BTT were multi-OS, so I could just copy the configuration across platforms, instead of having to recreate from scratch (Linux), or not at all (ChromeOS).
- Touch-Tab to switch apps with 3 fingers.
Both are free and open source.
Use Windows or Linux. Good luck and have fun!
WSL isn't a solution to this problem, especially ever since they gave up adding support to the actual Windows kernel and just used a virtual machine.
I shouldn't have to wait for all my software to add support for putting the WSL wrapper around all of their commands. I should be able to just run them on bare metal. This is why JetBrains IDEs can do profiling, valgrind etc on macOS but not Windows.
Some of us enjoy circles. Use whatever you like, but complaining A is not B is annoying.
I'm glad that Sonoma is adding the checkbox to turn it off for those who need it but it's never been a bother for me.
The maximum speed that can be configured using the built in tools for both mouse and trackpad is way too slow for my liking.
In the past I used MagicPrefs to do this, but that sadly doesn't work anymore. This is the first time I'm able to do this again, and with a free tool too! Thanks a lot for submitting this.
LinearMouse – A minimal app to get rid of scrolling acceleration on macOS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27485051 - June 2021 (76 comments)
I’m not sure how it stacks up to this open source project, but it’s definitely been worth the license cost to me over the years.
"You're holding it wrong" taken to absolute mastery.
It's `brew install --cask linearmouse` for those wondering.
Windows has had built-in acceleration since Windows XP (maybe 2000?) - it's the "Enhance pointer precision" option in the (classic) Mouse control panel.
There's also an acceleration curve you can customize, but there's no built-in GUI editor, but the data's all in the HKCU\Control Panel\Mouse registry keys.
I am not aware of any trackpad failures on Mac.
As an aside, I had just started working on a tool to do that since all I want is to have natural scrolling on my trackpad but regular scrolling on my mouse. Will have to take a look if this goes with the a11y route or the custom driver path.
Edit: looks like this modifies CGEvent
That’s 100 % subjective. There’s not a single reason why sliding your finger on a mechanical movable surface should behave differently than sliding it on a touch sensitive surface. You’re used to it behaving differently and that’s fine, but I prefer to have the same behavior for both and neither of us is right or wrong.
