MacBooks have some of the best trackpads, but the experience of using a full-fledged mouse with a Mac could be even better. If you are looking for detailed scrolling control over your external mouse or want to customize it in another way, BetterMouse is the tool you need.
Warning: The BetterMouse is a great tool, but not for everyone. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can have a much more intense mouse experience than ever before – but we’ve taken you through a variety of options to make sure you can use it. (Note that BetterMouse can also be used to customize scrolling behavior on the internal trackpad, but is best with an external mouse.)
It’s also worth noting that the app costs $ 5, but offers a weekly free trial. You can install BetterMouse from their website or using Homebrew. (You must grant them access rights to use the various features.)
Fine-tune your scrolling speed
Open BetterMouse and click on the menu bar icon at the top of the screen to see all the options. The Scrolling tab contains (obviously) all scrolling-related customization options.
The first three parameters (duration, breakpoint, speed) are related to the smooth scrolling option under this slider. If smooth scrolling is enabled, you can change these three settings in stages to control the scrolling speed. These three sliders work best if your mouse has a wheel. For mice that use touchpads or gesture-based scrolling, adjusting the scroll settings isn’t very helpful, as typing accuracy is significantly reduced. The acceleration settings mimic the scroll speed options in macOS System Preferences. It’s great to have in BetterMouse, but it offers nothing more than what’s already inside.
The Hori Speed option allows you to control the horizontal scroll speed. This isn’t very useful on modern webs, as most websites respond to designs. However, many video editing programs still make heavy use of side-scrolling, and you can also adjust this setting to control the scrolling speed of these programs.
There are several other explanations on the scroll tab. The only thing to note is you should disable Vertical Invert and Horizontal Invert if you want your computer to scroll in the same direction as your mouse wheel.
When you’ve finished customizing these settings, click the Take a snap button on the same page to save them. If you later change something and want to go back to your saved settings, hit the Switch to snap button.
Customize your cursor speed
If you find that the mouse pointer is too slow or randomly flies to different corners of the screen, the BetterMouse cursor controls can help you find a happy medium. Go to the Cursor tab in BetterMouse and change the speed and acceleration values.
Decreasing the speed will slow down your runner’s movement and the increase will be even faster. Once you find a sweet spot, adjust the Acceleration setting to change how quickly it responds to the scrolling speed you selected earlier. Warning: Selecting high values for speed and acceleration can make mouse control more difficult. For most people, the speed of movement of the mouse should be around 20 and the rate of acceleration should be around five.
Set up specialized mouse gestures
The best feature of BetterMouse is that you can create custom shortcuts and associate them with mouse buttons. For example, you can press Command + middle mouse button in the app’s button menu to associate it with a change in system volume. You can combine these key combinations with different modifier keys (Option, Shift, Command, etc.). Even better, you can set app-specific shortcuts, so the same button can be reused for different tasks.
For example, in Chrome you can set the 3 button on the mouse to add a new tab and set the 4 button to refresh the page. Slack adds hyperlinks to the selected text with button 3 and removes all unwanted text with button 4. Message. Bed. In Final Cut Pro, you might want one button to activate the Knife tool while another activates or deactivates snapping. You can configure as many shortcuts as there are buttons on your mouse and expand this list of keyboard/mouse button shortcuts for just about any application on your Mac.
The interface used to map these shortcuts is a bit tricky. For this to work, you need to open the Buttons tab in the app, then tap the desired shortcut, which will bring up the shortcut in the menu. Once it appears, click on the drop-down menu and choose what you want to assign to it. This feature will not work if you allow other apps such as Mac Mouse Fix to control the mouse buttons. All other apps must have button binding disabled for BetterMouse to work as expected.
Finally, you can control these shortcuts on a per-app basis by navigating to the Exceptions tab of your app. Add the apps you need to the list and change shortcuts as needed.