Fix Excessive Horizontal Mouse Scrolling on macOS

mousescrolling

On a MacBook Pro with OS X 10.9.1 (13B42) with both the trackpad and a Bluetooth "magic mouse" I observe an excessive amount of (especially) horizontal scrolling.

A trivial touch to the mouse (or touching the trackpad with two fingers) may result in dozens of (especially horizontal) scroll events. This is especially pronounced in Excel, Firefox, and Emacs (which notice horizontal scrolls) but not in Terminal and Outlook (which mostly ignore them).

Mouse tracking in system settings is set to the 3rd notch (out of 10).

It is possible to disable or reduce horizontal scroll events?

Best Answer

Yes, you can disable horizontal scroll events. I know this because unwanted horizontal scrolling with the Magic Mouse used to drive me insane, especially with Adobe products.

MagicPrefs, a "free application […] to improve the functionality and configuration options of the Apple Magic Mouse", indeed let me disable horizontal scrolling. It's somewhere in the "Magic Mouse" settings tab. Hope this helps.

Related Solutions

MacOS – Change the mouse wheel scrolling acceleration

Hope you're still reading - I highly recommend one of the third party mouse managers like SteerMouse or USB Overdrive or ControllerMate.

I found the arch of the Magic Mouse just too low and went back to the old reliable Logitech MX Revolution, but I will never install Logitech software again without an excellent reason. These packages will let you configure all of the buttons and SteerMouse (haven't verified for the other two) will definitely let you specify linear or accelerated wheel scrolling with variable degree of acceleration.

MacOS – Mouse scrolling by ‘page’

USB Overdrive can do that but it's not free.

You could also add a rule like this to KeyRemap4MacBook's private.xml. The behavior when scrolling multiple ticks was a bit weird on the mouse I tested with; it only scrolled a full page about once every 0.5 seconds.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<root>
    <item>
        <name>Test</name>
        <appendix/>
        <identifier>94D0530F-70BA-4DA9-BD45-C223A689A807</identifier>
        <autogen>--ScrollWheelToKey-- ScrollWheel::UP, KeyCode::PAGEUP</autogen>
        <autogen>--ScrollWheelToKey-- ScrollWheel::DOWN, KeyCode::PAGEDOWN</autogen>
    </item>
</root>

You can also increase the scrolling speed with defaults write -g NSScrollWheelMultiplier -float 200.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

MacOS – Change the mouse wheel scrolling acceleration

MacOS – Mouse scrolling by ‘page’

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