#Mac mouse acceleration how to
#Mac mouse acceleration mac os x
#Mac mouse acceleration drivers

However, toggling it on or off is not a very quick process. I tried it in OS 10.7 Lion, but many of the sources claim to be using 10.6 Snow Leopard.Mouse acceleration can be useful sometimes, but it is certainly not recommended for gaming, which is why many users turn it off when playing a game. I won't cite a source, since this tip is available in many places on the web. If you want to disable acceleration on a trackpad instead of a mouse, the instructions are the same, just replace with wherever you see in the above (and use the Trackpad pane of System Preferences instead of the Mouse pane, obviously).

#Mac mouse acceleration mac os x

Mac OS X stores mouse and trackpad settings independently. To revert back to Apple default settings, just open the Mouse pane of System Preferences and change the Tracking Speed to anything, then quit System Preferences. After that, the pixels pointer moves / meters mouse moved ratio is constant but unfortunately not adjustable. I found I had to log out and back in again for it to take effect. In the Terminal, that seems to disable acceleration and set the mouse tracking speed to some constant predefined value which you can't change. However, if you set it to -1 by typing defaults write. Values of 0 ~ 3 won't disable acceleration, therefore. Normal values are 0 ~ 3, which can be set by moving the 'Tracking Speed' slider in the Mouse pane of System Preferences. GlobalPreferences Īt the Terminal prompt. To read its current value type defaults read. There's a hidden preference that you can change from the Terminal. For all other discussion, go have it here on the superuser site where it belongs.

#Mac mouse acceleration how to

Therefore the question above is about how to tackle this if you want to code your own mouse drivers. (See the first sentence of this question.) Here I'm trying to create my own solution, so to speak, using - I don't know - some HID API? A driver? A solution on the lines of 'open current user's prefs file and change this setting to this' should probably be posted on the other question, but note that such a solution probably doesn't exist.Ī lot of my reputation on StackOverflow has come from people voting up this answer, which I wrote way back before I realised that there are several stack exchange websites and that StackOverflow is for programming questions and answers only. Thanks in advance.Įdit: Although I've asked both questions to solve the same problem, this is the programmatical counterpart to the other one. I know the question is a bit open but I don't even know what kind of a solution could work.

#Mac mouse acceleration drivers

So anything is appreciated, really ('can't distribute drivers without certificate from Apple') but some documentation/reference would get me a long way ('Darwin's Next Generation Mouse Curve Editing API and Examples'). I'm a fairly experienced C programmer, both in user and kernel space (in Linux and Windows), but know next to nothing about Mac OS X or Darwin.

Can easily be applied/run by other people who want the same thing (all 42 of us on the planet).

Works on mice but not touchpads, tablets, magic wands.

Works on Snow Leopard (10.6.5) and later - much later, unless an important piece of the API gets deprecated.

I want my solution to be as simple, universal and unintrusive as possible, so some criteria might be: (Well, not true, but it's better to start from scratch.) Should I write a mouse driver? A startup program? A click-and-forget settings adjuster? A preferences pane? That is, no acceleration an adjustable but constant pixels pointer moves / meters mouse moved ratio. To summarize: I want to have linear mouse response on Mac OS X.

First of all, here's the userland question: Disabling mouse acceleration in Mac OS X superuser