As a Mac user, you may know that mouse behaviour is a little wonky, especially when it comes to mouse acceleration and using the back and forward buttons on your mouse.
If you have a Logitech mouse, you’re pretty much set as you can use the Logi Options+ software to configure your mouse and utlise the buttons on your mouse — a must-have in my opinion!
However, regardless of your mouse, there is one issue and that is mouse acceleration.
Disabling Mouse Acceleration
While mouse acceleration is great in theory, for my work and use case, it makes it a pain to navigate as I then need to re-learn how it behaves everywhere I use my mouse.
I occasionally play some games on my Mac and having mouse acceleration simply ruins the experience. Not only that, acceleration affects the ability to form muscle memory which is a major annoyance when it comes for work and play. Mouse acceleration may be useful on large displays, I simply increase my DPI and turn off mouse acceleration which makes me move more consistently.
The solution is to use an application called “LinearMouse”!
After much research, I found this gem of a program that allows you to not only disable mouse acceleration but also scroll acceleration and enable universal “back + forward” buttons to work across all apps!
This is huge!
This makes your 3rd party mouse (i.e. non-Magic Mouse) feel like a first-class citizen on your Mac. This program is indispensable for me now.
Another cool feature about this program is that each mouse you use on your Mac means that each mouse has it’s own profile. This means that you can fine-tune your settings for each mouse and make it your own (e.g. different settings for your work mouse vs gaming mouse).
The ability to also use the back/forward buttons in any app is also a benefit of using this application.
You can install it from their project page (see button above) or install it using Homebrew on your Mac.
brew install --cask linearmouse
Honestly, I am not sure why macOS doesn’t have the ability to disable mouse acceleration from the settings area or let alone, the ability to have native back/forward buttons for your mouse.
In any case, LinearMouse is a must-have app for my needs!
Hope you find this application useful!