Many people dislike third-party mice due to the absence of smooth scrolling and other features that are unclear to me. In the meantime, all these issues are easily solvable.
When I bought my iMac, I couldn’t grasp the full appeal of the Apple Magic Mouse. The mouse is too small, lacks a scroll function and a middle click, and don’t get me started on the charging port on the bottom. So, I bought the MX Anywhere 3 from Logitech and stopped suffering.
However, many people dislike third-party mice due to the absence of smooth scrolling and other features that are unclear to me. In the meantime, all these issues are easily solvable.
How to Turn Any Mouse into a Magic Mouse
To bring a Logitech mouse or any other mouse to a level of quality worthy of macOS, you can install the BetterMouse utility. With it, you can adjust scroll smoothness, cursor movement speed, and many other advanced features not available in the standard system or mouse settings.
What the Application Can Do
Upon first launch, you will need to grant permission for Universal Access, and then you can immediately start using BetterMouse. There’s no training or anything, just an icon in the System menu, and you're on your own.
This can be a bit frustrating (just look at the screenshot below).
There are four main sections of settings: scroll, cursor, buttons, and keyboard. You can also set up exceptions for specific applications, enable auto-start, and hide the icon.
Mouse Wheel Settings
This is perhaps the most complex settings section. It has three main blocks.
At first glance, it’s very hard to understand what each slider and checkbox does. But when you click the question mark icon, a tooltip appears that makes everything clear.
The first item is Physical V Scroll, which can be translated as "physical vertical scroll adjustment." At the top, there is a graph where you can understand in real-time how the settings affect the wheel’s behavior.
Below, you can change several parameters:
- Duration — the duration of the scroll per wheel tick in frames. The setting depends on the monitor refresh rate.
- Brake point — only affects scroll smoothness, determining at which frame the scroll acceleration starts.
- Speed — with the Smooth scroll option active, this sets the scroll speed in pixels per frame. With the option off, it’s in lines per tick.
- Acceleration — allows the screen content to scroll further with the same wheel turn angle over the same time.
- More smooth — applies post-processing to make scrolling even smoother.
There are also three additional options:
- Smooth scroll — simply activates smooth scrolling for your mouse in all directions.
- Acceleration — neutralizes the built-in system acceleration. If you set Acceleration to zero above, disabling this checkbox will result in zero acceleration.
- Vertical dir invert — inverts vertical scroll direction.
The next two setting blocks are less complex. Physical V Scroll adjusts horizontal scroll speed, with an option to enable inversion.
The Modified V Scroll section allows altering vertical scroll behavior:
- Shift to H scroll — turns vertical scroll into horizontal when Shift is held down.
- Ctrl to zoom — zooms in or out when Ctrl is held down and scrolling.
- Cmd to fast scroll — increases scroll speed when the ⌘ key is held down. The speed can be adjusted below.
The first two options can be inverted.
Cursor Settings
In this section, you can finely tune the cursor and partially the mouse buttons' behavior.
The Cursor control section essentially duplicates the system mouse speed settings, but you can separately adjust acceleration and speed. Speed is shown in frames per second. Additionally, you can lock the cursor position during gestures.
Below are your mouse settings, in my case, the MX Anywhere 3. I’m not sure if these options are the same for all mice, so I won’t dwell on them.
Mouse Button Settings
Here, you can remap standard mouse button actions to any of your preferences. You can assign hotkeys or specific actions.
Keyboard Button Settings
Similarly to mouse buttons, you can remap keyboard button functions.
Frankly, this is a strange option, but it could be useful in my case. For example, I’m annoyed by the absence of a Forward Delete key on the Apple keyboard, so I remapped F12 to it using Karabiner-Elements. This is quite an extreme solution to my problem.
Now, I can make all the necessary adjustments in one application.
Pricing
You can try BetterMouse without restrictions for a week, then you need to purchase a license for $7.99. The payment is one-time, and installation is allowed on five devices.
Conclusions
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, I don’t understand the problem with using third-party mice with macOS devices. I see no difference.
But if you do and feel it at your fingertips, I recommend trying BetterMouse. However, you need to really understand what you want to improve and by how much. If you just want a quick fix with one button, this is not for you.