You may have noticed that when you connect an external mouse to your Mac, it doesn’t feel so great. On a MacBook, the trackpad feels smooth. However, all the optimizations like mouse acceleration, scroll acceleration, etc don’t feel so good on a mouse. Not to mention the back and forward buttons might not work either.
In this guide, I’ll show you all the tools you need to fix your mouse experience.
You’ll be able to address these issues:
- Disable mouse acceleration
- Disable scroll acceleration
- Enable back/forward button functionality
- Fix the choppy scrolling
Disable mouse acceleration
I discovered an app called ExactMouse, made by SteelSeries. This app works on both Intel and M1 Macs. If you look around, there is a command line solution that doesn’t seem to work on the M1 Macs, so I recommend ExactMouse.
ExactMouse doesn’t have much in the way of customization or settings, but the mouse motion feels great and similar to Windows.
ExactMouse
Download: Link
Website: Link - Scroll to the bottom, under the Miscellaneous section
Price: Free
Disable scroll acceleration and fix the choppy scrolling
Scroll acceleration feels pretty good on trackpads, but it’s weird on a scroll wheel when you expect each notch on the wheel to scroll the same amount. I recommend an app called SmoothScroll.
It will also fix the choppy scrolling that you experience in apps like Safari.
SmoothScroll
Price: Free for 21 days, then $9.98/year
Enable back/forward button functionality
The back and forward buttons didn’t work for my Logitech mouse. The fix is to map your back button (usually mouse4) to the ⌘ + [ shortcut and your forward button (usually mouse5) the ⌘ + ] shortcut. This will work in practically every application.
Logitech G Hub
For Logitech mice, you can use the Logitech G Hub software to do the mapping.
Price: Free
Karabiner-Elements
For any mouse, you can use Karabiner-Elements, which is typically used for customizing keyboards.
Summary
After installing these mostly free software, your mouse should be feeling much better. Let me know if you have any questions or comments.