If you use a mouse with OS X download SmoothMouse right now. It’s free and imho makes mouse use in OS X actually pleasant.

Background

Let’s face it, OS X has some strange quirks and oddities that can drive me mad very quickly. One of my pet peeves has been the acceleration curves used for any mouse you chose to plug in. While the curves makes for a wonderful trackpad experience, for a mouse they stink. For detailed work they slow any mouse movement down to be beyond frustrating. For gaming, the curves remove any control you thought you may have. One solution is to disable the curves using

defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.scaling -1

The negative number at the end has the effect of disabling the acceleration curves. Positive values use the acceleration curves. Values 0-3 are the tracking speeds normally set in the system preferences GUI. Values greater than 3 are super fast to insane.

However, with the acceleration curves disabled, mouse movement is very slow and I’ve never found a way to speed it up. SmoothMouse adds a simple GUI to adjust tracking speed and disable acceleration curves for both trackpad and mouse independently.

Great stuff 🙂