Removing Mouse Acceleration OSX

Never use "curve" outside of "i saw these appealing curves last night at the bar". what you mean is no acceleration - the windows default has acceleration and ***** equally; but it can be tuned.

<Edited By Host>

Yes, and i want the pointer of os x to move like the one in windows. What should be used instead of *****s? graph? acceleration function?

By the way, did the host remove your comment in which you stated that i suck? Haha... Actually i came here to politely reply to that one.

If you're still having this issue, here's a simple fix you can use.

In a terminal window, enter the following lines

1) curl -O http://ktwit.net/code/killmouseaccel

This will fetch the script that allows you to disable Mouse or Trackpad acceleration

2) chmod +x killmouseaccel

chmod will allow the script to be executable

3) ./killmouseaccel mouse

This executes the script and disables mouse acceleration. You can also change "mouse" to "trackpad" if wanted.

This does reset on reboot, however, so you may want to create a script to run part 3 at boot.

does it work, has anyone tried it? would be f..... fantastic if there finally was a solution....!

thx, sean

This solution disables the mouse acceleration. The Problem is, that it disables scaling (the speed of the mouse cursor), too.

Then, if you increase the speed of the mouse cursor in system settings, the acceleration is being reinitialised.

thx for your response.

so in other words there is still no solution! this is unbelievable... for how long has this been going on!?

This little "mouse acceleration" app works, even after restart... although I still feel a tiny lag in the movement, pathetic... you would think a pointer movement operation on a $2000 overpriced machine would be simple.

Besides that, whats driving me crazy is the scroll wheel STILL has acceleration in it. So trying to determine the fine line when it does really slow to when it goes really fast is just hurting my brain. I guess this is how they level the playing field, very nice.

I found something that might be worth trying. I'm traveling at the moment and don't have my mouse on hand, but SteelSeries (gaming hardware manufacturer) has a tool called "SteelSeries Exact Mouse" available in their downloads section under "Tools".

It runs in the menu bar and can actively disable the mouse acceleration curve, even if you alter the mouse settings.

It simple enough to use as it only has three modes to select from:

Always On, the default, which actively disables the acceleration curve regardless of whether you change other mouse settings,

On, which disables acceleration but turns off if you alter the mouse settings, and

Off, no adjustment to acceleration.

Hello Drakaji,

i tried it out. Tool disables acceleration. "always on" is the preferred mode as you want the effect to sustain. Occasionally, it listens for changes in mouse settings and makes them revert. Unfortunately the mouse speed still cannot be changed, it is a fixed value. With this setting, you´ll have to move the mouse a lot in order to move the cursor from one edge of the screen to the other. In my opinion this is not a satisfying solution if you dont have a mouse where you can change the scaling (dpi or whatever) settings on the mouse itself.

Drakaji wrote:

If you're still having this issue, here's a simple fix you can use.

In a terminal window, enter the following lines

1) curl -O http://ktwit.net/code/killmouseaccel

This will fetch the script that allows you to disable Mouse or Trackpad acceleration

2) chmod +x killmouseaccel

chmod will allow the script to be executable

3) ./killmouseaccel mouse

This executes the script and disables mouse acceleration. You can also change "mouse" to "trackpad" if wanted.

This does reset on reboot, however, so you may want to create a script to run part 3 at boot.

Thanks for pointing that out. I forgot to give credit to ktwit.net "My" tool is just his code, which I merely wrapped an app container around for, so that it's easier to execute. (http://d-h.st/NNR)

I don't think this Apple will ever implement this feature as long as there's not enough gamers or nerds around and, let's face it, we're a minority to the big A.

sean.carmen wrote:

... for how long has this been going on!?

Since the first Mac hit the market, which actually was before Windows 1.0 did. By the time Windows 3 came out, some form of pointer acceleration was a standard feature of both systems, as it is today.

So just to clarify what might be confusing to some, what you really want isn't to turn it off but to make it more like Windows acceleration, with similar options to tweak it to your liking.

Windows mouse movement has acceleration? When I specifically tested at 5 different movement rates at different distances, the distance the cursor moved was (as far as my senses could tell) the same ratio as the distance the mouse was moved, which means there is no acceleration, its a linear relationship. As stated, the Apple cursor movement has been fixed with that add-on, but the scroll wheel, when you move it really slowly, for every revolution of the scroll wheel, you may get a tenth of a page of scroll... if you quickly flicker the scroll wheel as fast as you can, you rotate it a quarter turn and it goes down 5 pages, not 1 to 1 ratio. This was also the exact behavior of the mouse cursor. I understand how this can be useful if you always have to scroll only a 1/100th of a page or scroll through 20 pages quickly, but in reality, that is actually not that useful except for a very select group of people. Most people need to scroll a page or two here and there as they read down, and even when they have to find something, u rarely see web pages that are more than 2-3 pages long. If you are scrolling through a 100 page document, then there is the side bar you can simply drag to the exact page you want more precisely than an unpredictable accelerated scroll.

To me there is only one definition of "acceleration" as stated in the laws of physics, and if it = 0, in the real world, that means no acceleration.

If there were acceleration on the mac in previous OS's, it was either less or non-existant. Bottom line, if you have used macs your whole life and are used to it, its probably great since you have learned to deal with it and be good at it. If you are new to this, it ***** major doody as we have all read so far. Yes it is personal preference, but any "user friendly" touted system should have options as simple as this to please immigrants from other systems, why wouldnt you? Only one answer: Ignorant arrogance.

JMASTERJ wrote:

Windows mouse movement has acceleration?

Yes, by default it most certainly does. For example see Pointer Ballistics for Windows XP from Microsoft itself for a discussion of why it was included in the OS, the basics of how it works, & how it was changed in that OS version. Note that the reasons for including it are the same ones that led Apple to include it in the Mac OS, & that it works in a somewhat similar way in that there is an acceleration multiplier that changes at different pointer velocities. The big difference between the two OSs is how much & where the changes occur, & how much control over that the user has.

Or just Google "windows pointer acceleration" for a list of topics discussing it, including a few like this one that discuss subtle problems with it in pre-Windows 7 versions of the OS. So user complaints about pointer ballistics & precision are nothing new … for either OS! 😉

On another historic note, in the original Macs pointer movement was handled almost entirely by dedicated hardware independent of the CPU or OS, so there was no traditional OS-based driver software involved. That had the benefits of reducing interpolation errors to nearly zero & of not putting any additional load on the relatively low power CPU's of that era, but it also made it just about impossible to use software drivers to change pointer ballistics in any significant way. With the adoption of USB, Apple of necessity moved to a software-based driver model but it tried to preserve the benefits of the hardware based model as much as possible. Part of that (for good or bad, depending on what's important to you) involved limiting what third party drivers could do.

To oversimplify it greatly, in the Mac OS you can think of a third party mouse driver as a higher level one sitting on top of the more privileged, low level one provided by the OS, so you can never really turn off the OS driver & substitute a third party one for it, at least not without significantly rewriting parts of the OS itself. By contrast, Windows has allowed third party drivers to completely replace the built-in low level driver ever since Windows 3 (technically, I think 3.1 was the first to provide for this).

Both approaches have advantages & disadvantages. Apple's is at least potentially more stable, secure, & easier to maintain; Microsoft's is obviously more flexible. There are both good technical & historic reasons the two companies went different ways; neither ignorance nor arrogance is what motivated either one to make the choices they did.

First I would like to thank you for your informative and impartial response... i know my response was a bit on the rant-y side, but I respect your post.

I guess either way, what u r used to is more important than whatever "feature" each one has. But I swear when I used a top end Mac back in 2006-7 along with a PC, side by side, every day, for a year, I never experienced the annoyance of a different mouse behavior. Mabye that was already set a certain way, but I am 99% sure it was brand new because it was meant for my boss but she ended up deferring to me and keeping her old one.

Anyways, I do understand the Windows cursor drifting etc., I think I have experienced that, but I guess I mean in all practical purposes, in gaming, Adobe products, every day tasks, I never felt like the mouse has anything but a near 1-1 movement ratio, or it is much closer to it than Apple's. I dont really twirl by cursor in circles or move them in constant loops so those tests are good for testing but wasnt very applicable to my real world usage, even though it may come into play once a while. However, the Apple's accelerations comes into play on almost every motion, henceforth, annoying!

I only mentioned the ignorant arrogance as an exaggeration to the fact that Apple overcharges for their products and seeing people hang out at a Apple store just makes some of us laugh. I know there are real Geniuses (no pun intended, but Apple really asked for that one) working at Apple, as there are in many of the world's top firms.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the kind words about my post. I understand how frustrating it can be when you can't set pointer ballistics to suit your personal preferences, & I tried to keep that in mind when I wrote it.

Regarding Apple's accelerations coming into play on almost every motion, you are right. The difference is in Windows all the "inflection points" (using the terminology mentioned in the XP article) are clustered down around very low mouse speeds, so any mouse movements faster than that are on the flat, linear part of the curve. In the Mac OS, the equivalent points are spread out over a much larger range of speeds, with the top one only approached by crazy-fast mouse movements.

So the practical result is you are always somewhere in the nonlinear part of the curve. This is mitigated somewhat (but obviously not enough for some users used to Windows!) by the fact that at the higher speeds the change in the acceleration is lower. IOW, the curve begins to flatten out the closer you get to the top end, but never gets totally flat (linear) like it does with Windows.

And if that wasn't enough, there is still a little more to it than that:

Because the "Parent Transfer Function" (again, using the XP terminology) sets fixed locations for the inflection points independent of mouse speed (chosen, as MS says, based on a usability study) & the transfer function is the basis for the "family of curves" supported by the Windows OS driver, no matter which curve you select, unless you move the mouse slowly, you will always be on the flat part of the curve. Choosing a different curve just changes how steep it is.

The Mac OS does it differently. The inflection points are not fixed. They actually spread out or get closer together depending on the mouse "speed" setting. The result is the slider is actually changing two things at once, the steepness of the curve connecting the inflection points & the location on the curve of the inflection points themselves. Again, there are advantages & disadvantages to this. On the upside, you can get accelerated pointer movements at higher but still relatively low mouse speeds than you can with Windows; on the downside, that may be exactly what you want to avoid.

I know this won't solve anything, but maybe knowing what's going on "under the hood" will help you cope a little better with the limitations of whichever approach you like least.