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Disable Scroll Wheel Acceleration

How do I disable my Mouse's Scroll Wheel Acceleration in Mavericks?


Thanks for any help. Just to qualify:


I am not talking about mouse pointer speed acceleration.

I am not talking about my trackpad.

I am not using a Magic Mouse.


I am talking about the amount of lines my screen scrolls when I roll the scroll wheel on my mouse. Currently, if you rotate the wheel fast, it accelerates. Two lines at a time become 20 lines at a time. I don't want that. I want it to always be 2 lines at a time. I want to disable Maverick's built in scroll wheel acceleration.


For example:


When I move my mouse wheel, I can hear it click slightly as it moves to the next position. At a low "Scrolling Speed" as per the Mouse CP option it does about 2 lines per click. Therefore, 10 clicks should equal 20 lines. With acceleration enabled, 10 clicks can be 20 or 50 lines depending on how quickly I spin the wheel. This is what I want to disable. I want 10 clicks to always equal 20 lines regardless of how fast I spin the mouse wheel.


Some additional information:


The "Scrolling Speed" option in the Mouse CP changes the amount of lines the wheel moves, but it does not affect acceleration, which remains constant.

My mouse is wired, not using bluetooth.

My mouse is a logitech mouse, but the problem occurs with 3 other mouse brands as well.

This problem existed under 10.8, but not 10.7 or earlier.

This problem does not exist using Windows via bootcamp.


Thanks for any and all help!

Posted on Oct 30, 2013 1:56 PM

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Posted on Feb 22, 2017 3:40 AM

After many years of frustration with macOS & wheel mice, I've developed Smooze.


With Smooze you can choose how macOS scrolling & mouse buttons behave.


If disabling the acceleration is what you're after just toggle the "Animate" to Off and you're good to go. You can also set the number of lines you want to move on each tick.


The app is not free but that specific feature is **free and will always be free**.


User uploaded file


http://smooze.co

16 replies
Question marked as Best reply

Feb 22, 2017 3:40 AM in response to plochner

After many years of frustration with macOS & wheel mice, I've developed Smooze.


With Smooze you can choose how macOS scrolling & mouse buttons behave.


If disabling the acceleration is what you're after just toggle the "Animate" to Off and you're good to go. You can also set the number of lines you want to move on each tick.


The app is not free but that specific feature is **free and will always be free**.


User uploaded file


http://smooze.co

Nov 1, 2013 9:19 AM in response to igstan

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like that works under Mavericks. I had it running for Mountain Lion and after upgrading to Mavericks, it was still running on startup, but the Scroll Wheel Acceleration was back.


I'll put it through some tests again but I'm pretty sure that helpful little addon doesn't do anything in Mavericks.

Feb 17, 2014 8:39 PM in response to keitsi

Ok, I've figured it out.


https://github.com/jfdno/DisableExtremeScrollAcceleration


It doesn't actually disable the acceleration entirely but makes it much more liveable with. I reduce the acceleration factor by 5 (the factor's used to compute an acceleration curve).


I've tried disabling it but then the scroll increments are way too fine -- I haven't found a way yet to scale them back up properly.


Try it out and let me know.

Mar 15, 2014 11:51 PM in response to keitsi

I hear what you're saying.


I just bought my first mac a few weeks ago and have been frustrated by the mouse performance from day one.


I'm using an old Logitech mouse. It's a notebook model (M-UV94) where the cord can be wrapped around the body in a groove storing it quite neatly. It still works great. I really like it and it's not sold anymore, so I even repaired part of it with super glue a few weeks ago, and it's working just like new again, that is, when I use it on my IBM Thinkpad.


I finally transferred all of my files over from the old machine and have started using the Macbook full time now. So I got to looking closer at the mouse settings to see if something could be done about the performance. Actually I was thinking it might be a compatibility issue with the Mac hardware and was almost resigned to laying it to rest and buying a new one. But after poking around on the web and downloading the Logitech software for Mac, I realized that the poor performace is being caused, not by the mouse, but by the acceleration OS X applies to the mouse control!


The result of this accelleration gives the mouse a much less accurate feel to it. The effect is particularly noticable with the scroll wheel, almost to the point of rendering it useless.


On a PC there is no accelleration applied, so the movement of the cursor on the screen is directly proportional to the movement of the mouse. In other words the cursor moves the same distance on the screen no matter how fast the mouse if moved (likewise with the scroll wheel the screen scrolls the same amount for each click of the wheel, no matter how fast it's turned). So, the way I see it, your brain becomes trained to this consistent, proportional movement between the cursor and mouse, with your hand to cursor position remaining consistent. So your hand/eye coordination becomes finely calibrated such that you can make very rapid and precise movements,


However, on the Mac, by introducing accelleration the proportional movement between the cursor and mouse motion is gone. The movement of the mouse becomes unpredictable because it is too difficult to control the rate of accelleration with precision. Also your hand to cursor position on the screen starts to drift because the accelleration is not always the same for movements back and forth across the screen. The result is that your brain cannot predict the movements of the cursor. Maybe you can get use to the accelleration somewhat, but I would say that nobody will be as accurate and comfortable using accelleration applied to a mouse as without it.


Even if I am wrong about this, and there are actually people out there that prefer accelleration, there are obviously a lot of people - all PC uses for example - who are not accustomed to this. Also, I understand it was only introduced a couple years ago on OS X. So would it not make sense to give the user the ability to disable the accelleration??? (As it is now, this isn't possible. Even using the Logitech software.) Especially with such a key user interface device as the mouse. Why in god's name did they start _ing with the mouse controls like this???


Come on Apple. Pull an engineer off the iPhone team to fix this problem. One engineer is probably all that's needed.


Dare I say, Steve Jobs is rolling over in his grave.


I thought I was done with posting rants like this after decades of frustration with Microsoft ...

Mar 17, 2014 6:24 AM in response to plochner

I had this problem for a long time, and I've struggled to find a solution.


The latest configuration I'm most happy with is to enable scrolling inertia, which I used to disable in the past. Inertial scrolling makes accelerated scrolling a bit more bearable. It's not like before, but at least now I don't have skipped pages. Because of inertia I can swipe less often, and an increased time interval in scrolling swipes means that the acceleration doesn't kick in. Without inertia, it's absolutely horrendous.


It's not a solution, but I found it's a configuration state that's easier for me to adapt to.

Disable Scroll Wheel Acceleration

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