Don't Get Caught (Middle Mouse) Mac OS

adminMay 24 2021

Don't Get Caught (Middle Mouse) Mac OS

Check out my other Mac productivity tips!

One of the great takeaways from Tim Ferriss’s podcast interview with Noah Kagan was the impact your mouse tracking speed can have on your productivity. By whacking the tracking speed up all the way, you can significantly increase the speed at which you get things done on your computer. If the increase in speed seems too much, give it 10-minutes and you’ll be amazed at how quickly you can adapt to the new speed.

I’m using the Apple Magic Mouse that has virtually no buttons at all, but I was able to assign MIDI learn after I installed the prefpane. By default it has the “middle axis” assigned to middle click, but I changed it to three-finger click to avoid problems. It installed under Os X Sierra 10.12.3 and acted nicely under Ardour 5.8. This game is almost unplayable for me on Mac (OS X Mavericks, 10.9.4) because of 3 mouse issues that are distracting or prevent correct control. (1) the system mouse cursor shows up at the same time as the in-game cursor, but often in a different location. This makes it hard to aim and control and is distracting. (2) when you move the mouse towards the bottom of the screen, the OS X System. If you're a fan of middle-clicking, a Mac's trackpad or the Magic Mouse might not be your best friends. While the functionality offered by the middle mouse button can easily be replaced with other actions, users who are accustomed to clicking a scroll wheel will find the transition to another device quite difficult.

Choose Apple menu  System Preferences, then click Accessibility. Select Pointer Control in the sidebar. (In earlier versions of macOS, select Mouse & Trackpad.) Click the Trackpad Options button. Also, make sure the mouse’s receiver isn’t plugged into a USB hub. This is another one of those things that don’t matter in 99% of cases, but sometimes the hub doesn’t handle mice properly. Ensure this isn’t a problem by connecting the USB receiver directly to the Mac.

I currently use a MacBook and have had the trackpad/mouse speed all the way up for some time. However, I recently found myself thinking; I WANT MORE!

Unfortunately, Apple’s upper limit on tracking sensitivity isn’t as high as I’d like. So, I started Googling around to try and find a quick and easy solution for increasing the trackpad/mouse speed.

I came across an app called BetterTouchTool that lets you customise the tracking speed and add a tonne of other trackpad functionality to your computer. It looks nice, but all I wanted to do was increase the trackpad speed without fluffing around with a tonne of other features and settings (plus I’m overly cautious about adding unnecessary apps to my computer when a simple terminal command or Automator workflow will do).

It didn’t take long, but I found a way to customise the trackpad speed using Terminal.

Use the following steps to increase your trackpad sensitivity:

Step one: Open Terminal (located in the Utilities folder of your Applications. Or Spotlight search “terminal”).

Step two (optional): Enter the following command to view your current speed:

This will return a number that represents the tracking speed.

Step three: To speed up your mouse tracking, you can simply change this number by typing the following command, replacing the “mouse speed” with a new number such as 5.0:

The maximum mouse speed you can access from the System Preferences is 3.0. I changed my speed to 7.0 which is perfect for my liking.

Step four: Restart your computer.

To revert the speed back to normal, you can adjust the mouse tracking speed in system preferences, or use Terminal to set the value back to 3.0.

Check out my other handy Mac tips:

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Facility escape stealth game.
Don't get caught by the lights and lasers.

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