• Computer
• MacOsx
• MouseSensitivity

Problem: Mouse tracking in Mac OSX is either painfully slow or incredibly fast. OSX Mouse Preferences do not allow adequate tracking speed settings for certain mouses.
CategoryMacOsx CategoryShell CategoryDevice

What you see is a slider from slow to fast with 9 increments. The slider works well with some mouses and fails with others, depending on the tracking hardware. On those mouses, any settings above the second increment is drastically too fast while any setting below is much too slow.

In addition to that, there is a Mouse Acceleration setting which adjusts the differential between fast and slow mouse motion. Many new OSX users complain about this adjustment since they are not used to it. Logitech mouses are especially affected by bad tracking sensitivity. Mine is a Logitech V470 Bluetooth mouse, which is a great mouse but by default the tracking is extremely sensitive.

Solution: Set the mouse speed numbers manually. The mouse preferences are in an invisible file:

~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

First open Mouse Preferences and set the speed to the closest you want.
Then download this Apple application which is included in Xcode, uploaded to here for your convenience:

Computer/Property_List_Editor.dmg

Quit Preferences then open Property List Editor. Navigate to file:

~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

or paste this command in Terminal:

open ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist

Click on the triangle and find a variable called "com.apple.mouse.scaling", your window should look like this:

If you can't find the key your preferences are not writing the variable, so you will have to add it manually. I will leave that task to your imagination, but everything you need is in the screenshot. The value of.008 is the ideal speed for an older Logitech V270 bluetooth mouse which is unusable without the custom scaling. For the new Logitech V470 bluetooth mouse, a value of .07 seems to work pretty well with the 23 inch cinema display.

You need to relogin to apply new mouse speed numbers.

If you have installed an additional mouse controller such as MagicPrefs you need to disable that as it overrides built-in OSX settings.

Or open Terminal, paste this command then relogin:

defaults write -globalDomain com.apple.mouse.scaling -float .008

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