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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I don't know from this comment on what side of the fence you are but plugging a mouse into a mac has always felt horrible to me, like I was mousing through mud, I would always feel like the pointer slowed down too early and then I would have to reach a long way to actually get to the target. May just be my muscle memory was attuned to Windows/Linux.

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I absolutely agree, but it’s a personal preference thing.

Years ago I had this argument with a coworker, and I tried to take the position that the Windows curve is better for games. He politely disagreed, I implied that he was a casual gamer, and he gently told me of the year his Quake III team won the world championship. We spent the next while watching demo videos of him doing 360 noscopes with the rail gun against a target in the air.

I handily lost that disagreement.

When I used a mouse on macOS, the first thing I did was install the Microsoft mouse drivers,[1] which had Windows acceleration curves built in as an option. Unfortunately they stopped updating them beyond 10.7 Lion.

Now I’ve just gone over to Apple’s trackpads for 100% of my cursor needs.

[1] http://download.microsoft.com/download/B/1/0/B109F931-70E2-4...

Yeah, I did the same, I always wondered if that was by design, like: "You don't need an ugly mouse next to your macbook, we'll make sure of that". But the touchpad was also indeed that good that I didn't feel I needed a mouse. Opposite on Linux/Windows where I love my external mouse. I'm a bit on the fence about what I prefer, Linux with mouse or mac with touchpad. Both (as in MacBook touchpad on my Linux laptop) would be nice...

Mouse acceleration has always been different on Macs, just like font rendering, keyboard shortcuts and menu bar position.

Apple is very opinionated about all the parts of User Interfaces (including inputs), it's great if you agree with their opinions.

I use Steelseries ExactMouse to get rid of that odd acceleration curve. It works for any mouse brand and it still works on Mac OS 10.13, maybe newer OS'es too.

https://downloads.steelseriescdn.com/drivers/tools/steelseri...

The mouse on Apple has been horrible since at least 2005 or so (and I haven't used older macs than that). Low update rate, laggy, imprecise. Windows and Linux have had it right for a long time, Windows probably since 2000 or so.

The trackpad, it's the opposite.

I have the same with the mouse, had to install http://triq.net/mac/mouse-acceleration to tune mouse acceleration to 2.3 (!). Now it is fine, though it forgets the setting every reboot (despite showing up as 2.3), so I have to touch the slider every time I restart. Fortunately that's not too often.

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