Photo: Nick Beer (Shutterstock)
MacBooks come equipped with among the best trackpads around, but the experience of using a full-sized mouse with a Mac could definitely be better. If you’re looking for granular control over your external mouse’s scrolling behavior or want to customize it in other ways, BetterMouse is the tool you need.
A word of caution: BetterMouse is a great tool, but it’s not for everyone. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you could end up with a significantly worse mouse experience than before—but we’ll walk you through its various options to make sure you get it working for you. (Note that BetterMouse can be used to customize your internal trackpad’s scrolling behavior too, but it works best with an external mouse.)
It’s also worth mentioning that the app costs $5, but offers a week-long free trial. You can install BetterMouse from its website or by using Homebrew. (You’ll need to grant it Accessibility permissions to make the most of its various functions.)
Fine-tune your scrolling speed
Open BetterMouse and click the icon in the menu bar at the top of the screen to reveal all its options. The Scroll tab houses all scrolling related customization options (naturally).
The first three settings—Duration, Brake Point, and Speed—are linked to the Smooth Scroll option located below these sliders. If you’ve enabled Smooth Scroll, you can change these three settings incrementally to control how fast you can scroll. These three sliders make the most sense if your mouse has a wheel—for a trackpads or a mouse that uses gesture-based scrolling, your inputs are a lot less precise, which makes tweaking scroll settings less useful.
The Acceleration setting mimics the scroll speed option in macOS’ System Preferences. It’s nice to have in BetterMouse, but it offers nothing beyond what’s already built-in.
The Hori speed option lets you control the speed of horizontal scrolling, which isn’t too useful on the modern web, as most websites have moved to a responsive design. But lots of video editing apps still make heavy use of horizontal scrolling, and adjusting this setting will let you control the speed of scrolling within those apps, too.
The Scroll tab has a few other self-explanatory options. 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 your mouse cursor to be too slow or randomly flying to various corners of the screen, BetterMouse’s cursor controls can help you find a happy medium. Go to the Cursor tab in BetterMouse and change the Speed and Acceleration values.
Reducing Speed will make your cursor move slower and increasing it will make it go faster. When you’ve found the sweet spot, tweak the Acceleration setting to change how fast it ramps up to the scrolling speed you previously chose. Warning: Choosing high values for both speed and acceleration can make the mouse very hard to control. For most people, the mouse’s scrolling speed should be around 20 and the acceleration value should be around five.
Set up specialized mouse gestures
BetterMouse’s best feature is that it allows you to create custom shortcuts and bind them to mouse buttons. For example, you can press Command + middle-click in the app’s Buttons menu and bind it to changing your system volume. You can combo these shortcuts by using different modifier keys (Option, Shift, Command, etc.) for each. Better yet, you can set app-specific shortcuts, allowing you to reuse the same buttons for different tasks.
In Chrome, for instance, you could set Button 3 on your mouse to add a new tab and Button 4 to reload the page, while in Slack, Button 3 adds a hyperlink to your highlighted text, and Button 4 clears all unread messages. Perhaps in Final Cut Pro, you want one button to activate the blade tool, while you want another to enable or disable snapping. You can set as many shortcuts as you have buttons on your mouse, and extend that list with mouse button/keyboard combo shortcuts, for just about every app on your Mac.
The interface used to map these shortcuts is a bit tricky. To get it to work, you have to open the Buttons tab in the app and then press the shortcut you have in mind, which will make the shortcut appear in the menu. Once it shows up, click the drop-down menu and choose what you’d like to map it against.
This feature won’t work if you’ve allowed other apps, such as Mac Mouse Fix, to control your mouse buttons. You’ll need to disable the button bindings in any other apps to allow BetterMouse to function as expected.
Finally, you can control these shortcuts on an app-specific basis by going to the Exceptions tab in the app. Add the app you want to the list and change the shortcuts as you like.
