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Comment by Arainach

1 day ago

Not sure why this is getting downvotes, it's absolutely true. For a very long time you couldn't even set different scroll directions for external mice and the touchpad - even if it's (maybe? I forget) supported now it's always been an area Apple didn't care about and was far behind Windows and Linux.

I assume it’s getting down votes because it’s off-topic. The parent comment was suggesting external mice as a temporary measure to debug the intermittent issue they’re facing.

Whether or not external micr suck on MacOS doesn’t really matter. The objective was to diagnose an issue.

  • Well, if the suggestion is to use an alternative for a while to diagnose an issue that causes equivalent or even worse issues, then it might not be(come) very debuggable.

Recent switcher to macos. I can't find a way to separately set mouse acceleration and scroll wheel momentum.

I use a trackball for RSI reasons, in order to get across the screen in a single flick means high sensitivity, mouse acceleration is absolutely needed to be able to make small movements. This makes my scroll wheel useless because a single scroll moves the page about 1/10 of a line

  • I will pile on here and claim Apple is shockingly hostile to accessibility. From the weird way tabs work for focus to the limited options for text clarity, to the lack of control for mice customization, it feels like it has been a low item on their priorities for some time.

  • Have you tried Better Mouse? IIRC, it can set different settings per HID.

It's not supported as of now. Tools like Scroll Reverser are still needed to specify scrolling behavior between the touchpad and an external mouse.

That was my experience as well. macOS adopted the iOS UI pattern of list cells using a swipe gesture to show a delete button and other actions. This doesn’t work with mouse and you have to use the right click context menu. This is a constant annoyance when switching between the Mac with an external mouse and the one with a trackpad, as it breaks your muscle memory.

Oh is that supported now? I've always used some tool (ScrollReverser) to fix this.

  • Another comment suggests that third-party tools are still required and that Apple still hasn't added support for this, which makes me wonder if anyone at Apple uses an external mouse or if this is a scenario they literally don't care about.