Being a MacBook user, my job requires me to log in to a Windows VM from my MacBook, so I bought a new keyboard and mouse to help me cope with that.
Colourful right? It makes development very enjoyable.
But here comes the problem:
I realised that the scroll direction on my new mouse mimics the scroll direction of the Apple trackpad. I like how in 2011, Apple introduced natural scrolling on the trackpad to mirror the way we use our phones. But to me, this feels awkward on the mouse because I'm not interacting with the screen using my fingers. At my workplace, I'm kinda forced to use the old-school scroll direction: roll the mouse wheel up to scroll up and down to scroll down.
So, I did a quick search and found that it's such a common problem that some people even wrote to Apple:
After trying out several solutions, I finally found one that I'm happy with and would recommend: https://mos.caldis.me/
Installed the app, opened it up and saw that both Smooth Scrolling and Reverse Scroll were already checked for me. On top of that, I checked the Launch on Login as well, so that the setting stays.
The app made scrolling with a mouse buttery smooth, as advertised. But it also created another issue when I'm in my company's VM using Citrix. It caused my mouse wheel to take a gigantic step every time I scroll, jumping too forward and too backward past where I intended to stop. Luckily there's a nifty tab called Exception that helps me to customise my mouse settings for any particular app. I customised the settings for my mouse to disregard global settings when it's in Citrix and reduced the step speed and duration to the minimum.
I can finally get back to developing without experiencing brain fart when switching between trackpad and mouse.
Top comments (0)