Every mouse is a little different—some accelerate faster than others, for example—and that can get annoying (and even disorienting) if you use one mouse at home and another at work. The Mac’s mouse panel in System Settings lets you adjust things like tracking speed, sure, but changing the setting for one mouse changes it for all of them, meaning you can’t really get the two devices to meet in the middle.
LinearMouse is a free app that lets you choose different settings for every mouse and touchpad you connect to. This can help you solve the acceleration problem I just mentioned and also lets you do things like use natural scrolling on one device and not others. It can also customize all the buttons on your mouse.
To get started, you need to download the application and launch it. You will be asked to grant Accessibility permission, which is necessary in order for the application to function. After that you can start configuring your devices. By default, the application will configure whichever device you’ve used most recently—you can configure a specific device instead by clicking the name of your current device in the top toolbar and unchecking the “Auto switch to the active device” option. Do that and you can choose which of your currently connected devices you want to configure.
Credit: Justin Pot
The app allow you to configure scrolling, pointer movement, and all the buttons on your mouse. The scrolling section has a modifier keys section that I particularly like, which allows you to do things like hold the Command key while scrolling to zoom in.
Credit: Justin Pot
The buttons section, meanwhile, can re-map the back and forward buttons your mouse may have so that it emulates the swiping motion on a trackpad. You might find that this allows you to use the buttons in more applications. There’s also the ability to customize any button on your device to a wide variety of actions, from Mission Control to media playback. You can even trigger a Terminal command, if you want to get fancy.
There’s one more level of customization here. You can choose settings for any mouse that are specific to a particular application. So if you want to map the buttons on your mouse to do certain things while you’re using a particular application, or playing a particular game, you can do that. You can also have your mouse behave differently on different displays. You might, for example, want your mouse to move faster on your giant widescreen without speeding it up on the smaller ones you sometimes use. That’s possible.
Basically, this is an application you can tweak endlessly to get exactly the experience you want. It’s also completely free. Check it out if you wish your mouse worked differently.
