Mouse cursor acceleration profiles

User avatar
Daniel Beardsmore

22 Nov 2014, 16:02

I still use a Macintosh running Tiger, and one of the things I notice about it is just how awkward and finicky its mouse cursor acceleration profiles are. Every time I start using it, I struggle with moving the mouse accurately for a while, as it seems to swing between "glued" to "on drugs".

The mouse is a Logitech Laser MX200¹ and I have the tracking speed on notch 7 (of 10).

In Windows, I have a Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical 1.1 with the tracking speed at notch 10 (of 11!) as the IMO has very sluggish tracking compared to most mice (equivalent to notch 4 or 5 of anything else). I have enhanced pointer precision turned on, whatever that does.

I've always found Macintosh pointer acceleration to be slow and unhelpful, while Windows pointer acceleration always seems natural no matter what version of Windows it is and no matter what mouse anyone has. For me, Windows succeeds perfectly in giving me good "swing" around a large desktop (3200×1200 at work) yet retaining very intuitive low speed tracking.

(I do struggle a little bit, possibly owing to the hyper acceleration needed with Microsoft's own lumbering lummox mice; their Comfort Mouse 4500 though was fed steroids as that's way too far in the opposite direction — a falling speck of dust landing on it will move the cursor halfway across the screen. I have no idea why people can't standardise on what speed the mouse reports back to the computer, since it's not as though the MS Comfort Mouse 4500 is marketed as the "Crazy mouse for people too dim to find the cursor speed slider".)

Obviously everyone's mileage varies, and someone here has already said that he doesn't like acceleration and turns it off entirely. This depends in part on how lazy you are. Being lazy, I move the mouse solely with my wrist in a claw grip, whereas if you move your whole arm you don't need anywhere near as much a speed boost.


What's the general consensus here about whether Apple or Microsoft are more in tune with how their customers operate mice?


¹ I think — the mouse does not have a human-readable model number printed on it nor does it say anything useful about itself to the Mac

User avatar
Laser
emacs -nw

22 Nov 2014, 16:08

It's certainly an issue between lazy or laser (fast)

:geek:

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

22 Nov 2014, 16:11

I always found mac mouse acceleration very annoying even though in the latest MacOS versions I believe they changed it somehow and it now behaves similarly to windows. On older mac the only solution for me is to use steermouse http://plentycom.jp/en/steermouse/

User avatar
ne0phyte
Toast.

22 Nov 2014, 16:14

Mouse acceleration make computers unusable for me. I prefer a rather high mouse speed combined with my, by now really good, muscle memory.
I have no problems moving straight to buttons, menus, etc. in one fast motion, stopping exactly where I want to go *. Mouse acceleration always felt unpredictable to me.

* This might also be the result of thousands of hours I spent on FPS games over the past 8 years :D

User avatar
Muirium
µ

22 Nov 2014, 18:24

Haven't noticed any difference between versions of OS X, myself. (Or against the classic Mac OS for that matter. But it's been a while…)

Love me a slow pointer speed / high acceleration environment. I did that back on Windows too. And I'm a sharp shooter in FPSs as well. (I learned mouse + keyboard shooters on the original Quake.) I'd call our approaches equally good, Neo, but obviously opposite! It's down to taste.

I'd need to try Windows again to answer your question, Daniel. Just might soon, actually, now the old Mac Pro is running. Got some games to catch up on before I get ennui…

Findecanor

22 Nov 2014, 23:05

I owned a Mac once... for a couple of months. It ran Tiger.
The funky mouse acceleration and the lack of hinting in the font renderer were largely contributing to why I sold it.

jacobolus

23 Nov 2014, 04:42

I find the Mac mouse acceleration to be the best implementation I’ve yet found for low-to-medium precision mice, and likewise for every trackpad/trackball I’ve ever tried.

On the other hand, with very high precision mice (>1000 counts per inch) and very large / pixel dense displays, I find linear (no acceleration) mice to also work pretty well.

Windows didn’t have any acceleration all until fairly recently, I believe, but I’m not an expert. I always used to find using a mouse on Windows to be an incredibly frustrating experience, and even worse was trying to use windows laptop trackpads circa 2000. I was often tempted to take a hammer to the trackpad. I have only used Windows machines a handful of times in the last few years, but I found the mouse acceleration to be pretty bad, except in one case where the mouse was very high precision (like 2000 counts/inch or something, I don’t precisely remember) and the acceleration was disabled (i.e. mouse movement mapped linearly to screen movement).

For the people who dislike Mac mouse acceleration: I suggest it mostly has to do with what you’re used to. If you spend a decade how to cope with a broken system, and then you’re suddenly confronted with something that works properly, it’s often a difficult adjustment. ;)

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

23 Nov 2014, 08:58

jacobolus wrote: For the people who dislike Mac mouse acceleration: I suggest it mostly has to do with what you’re used to. If you spend a decade how to cope with a broken system, and then you’re suddenly confronted with something that works properly, it’s often a difficult adjustment. ;)
I use Mac, Win and Linux since the age of times. I don't know why but I've found mac acceleration impossible to adapt to (and that's also the reason why there are so many mouse drivers alternatives for mac).... Until recently. Again I suspect that something changed. I'll let you know if I find the proof of that.

Update: it seems that a bug in mouse movement (present at least since Panther) has been fixed in OSX Lion. So I'm not completely crazy :)

User avatar
Muirium
µ

23 Nov 2014, 10:23

matt3o wrote: Update: it seems that a bug in mouse movement (present at least since Panther) has been fixed in OSX Lion. So I'm not completely crazy :)
Got a link? I've been using OS X daily since before Panther and well after Lion (2011's version) with both mice and trackpads, and I have noticed no difference. Yet any use of Ubuntu or Windows felt jarring, then and now!

@jacobolus: We've had similar experiences. I used to tweak all sorts of things on Windows to get a mouse that was at the sweet spot between hyperactive and stone dead, but it was always a juggling act. On the Mac, I simply stopped noticing the mouse. It worked as it should. That was one of the first things I got used to when I switched over in 2003: right on pinstripe-tastic Jaguar! Others I still don't like, almost 12 years later, include the Finder… naturally! Not that Windows had any better back then or now.

But mouse acceleration is a taste thing, I think. Like mechanical keyboard switch preferences, there seems to be a right answer to most of us, but damned if we can all agree for once and for all what it is!

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

23 Nov 2014, 10:42

Muirium wrote: Got a link?
apple doesn't make bugs public (no comment on that). I believe one of them is #7675662, but anyway if you search for "mac mouse bug" or "mac mouse problem" or "mac mouse acceleration" you'll find quite some interesting material.

User avatar
Muirium
µ

23 Nov 2014, 10:51

If anyone would notice a systematic acceleration bug — overnight, let alone one lasting a decade — it would be picky, pain in the arse, prissy Mac users like me (and Gruber and Siracusa and all the rest of them with renown). Just personally, I've racked up surely 20,000 hours on Macs in that time, with untold millions of mouse moves. And we haven't noticed but random grumbles on the internet have? I call bullshit. You've just gotten used to the Mac at last! Mouse acceleration hasn't changed. And yet the platform has in so many other ways over the years, including multi-touch mice and trackpads, and accelerated scrolling of course.

User avatar
Madhias
BS TORPE

23 Nov 2014, 11:15

Mouse acceleration and Mac is since a long time a hot topic! I also remember some years ago when i had to use a Mac for work the first thing i noticed was the weird acting mouse - now i got used to it somehow, but i can't say if Apple changed something or i 'learned' it. But i'm not saying that i like it.
jacobolus wrote: For the people who dislike Mac mouse acceleration: I suggest it mostly has to do with what you’re used to. If you spend a decade how to cope with a broken system, and then you’re suddenly confronted with something that works properly, it’s often a difficult adjustment. ;)
Oh yeah. Let's start an OS discussion :twisted:

User avatar
Muirium
µ

23 Nov 2014, 11:19

Linear vs. Clicky.
60% vs. 122 keys.
Mac vs. PC.

Fight fight!

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

23 Nov 2014, 11:32

mouse movement on anything that is not an apple mouse or any low quality/polling mouse was flawed on mac up to Lion. This is not disputable since Apple acknowledged the bug and fixed it. This I don't think it is strictly related to the acceleration problem but surely it was still cause of pain with the mouse cursor.

The problem with acceleration is maybe related to the fact the the mouse is handled on the software lever which adds some lag to the movement. There are workarounds but probably if you don't do gaming or graphics you hardly notice any difference.

User avatar
Muirium
µ

23 Nov 2014, 11:51

Like most folk on Macs, I only use low speed mice. (Typically Apple's own, but not always.) So if this is something that only affects high speed gamer style mice, then sure I remove my complaint! Even the Mac using gamers I know stick with slow mice, and leave acceleration on even when dual booting Windows.

User avatar
matt3o
-[°_°]-

23 Nov 2014, 12:09

the problem is exponential to the mouse polling. It is more noticeable on anything higher than 125-250hz (so not just "gaming mice")

User avatar
Daniel Beardsmore

23 Nov 2014, 13:39

jacobolus wrote: Windows didn’t have any acceleration all until fairly recently, I believe …
Acceleration was present since DOS days. I seem to recall being able to set all the multiplication factors in the Microsoft mouse driver for DOS using graphic equaliser–like sliders, but that might just be my imagination as I can't find any such program now.

Here's the profile data in MOUSE.INI; you can see however that it's designed to be used from a graphical interface:
MOUSE.INI.png
MOUSE.INI.png (12.43 KiB) Viewed 6350 times
(This is a copy of the HDD from my 486 PC.)

jacobolus

23 Nov 2014, 16:30

Here’s an article discussing this:
http://tidbits.com/article/8893

jacobolus

23 Nov 2014, 16:32

One thing that may have bugged me before about the Windows mouse acceleration curve (not sure whether it’s changed today) is that the pointer velocity gets faster based on the number of counts per update in the X and Y directions, separately, with no consideration for the angle of mouse movement. As a result, moving the mouse in a semi-diagonal direction will result in the pointer moving a different direction from the direction the mouse moves.

More than that though, I always found making small precise movements in Windows quite difficult. Perhaps that’s because I was used to an acceleration curve that was more forgiving in mapping lowish-velocity hand movements to small pixel movements.

User avatar
Daniel Beardsmore

23 Nov 2014, 17:01

jacobolus wrote: Here’s an article discussing this:
http://tidbits.com/article/8893
From TFA: "In practical terms this means that, frequently, as a user tries to use the mouse to move the pointer from point A to point B, the pointer motion feels sluggish. The user then tries to compensate for the sluggishness by moving the mouse faster, and the pointer suddenly goes flying across the screen and overshoots point B."

That is precisely what I experience. I'm not 100% sure that it's a flaw in Mac OS X, as I seem to get used to it (I've not noticed it much today, having only booted the Mac half an hour ago or so) but sometimes I'm wanting to tear out my hair. It might just be confusion for me in having a Mac and PC running side by side. One thing that I do cope with is " and @ being swapped — I seem to only make that mistake once per session.

I don't recall ever noticing problems with wrong-angle motion in Windows though. By moving the mouse side-to-side at increasing speed, the angle of pointer movement remains constant as the cursor travels further each time. It seems to work perfectly for me in 8.1 and I'm pretty sure it works perfectly in XP otherwise trying to use Photoshop and Inkscape would be painful. I don't recall any confusing motion in Windows 3.1 either, where I used to draw with the mouse. I've always used the mouse where normal people would use a tablet, including under acceleration.

jacobolus

24 Nov 2014, 01:45

madhias wrote:
jacobolus wrote: For the people who dislike Mac mouse acceleration: I suggest it mostly has to do with what you’re used to. If you spend a decade how to cope with a broken system, and then you’re suddenly confronted with something that works properly, it’s often a difficult adjustment. ;)
Oh yeah. Let's start an OS discussion :twisted:
By the way, in case it wasn’t clear, I’m joking. I don’t think there’s necessarily a “right” answer here, but rather just acclimation effects. It’s like when you rent a car that has a more or less sensitive steering wheel or gas pedal, it always takes a bit to get the hang of.

It would be interesting to see some careful research, though it’s probably tricky to find people who have good hand-eye coordination but don’t have lots of mousing experience with some existing acceleration profile to be test subjects. Even taking people with prior Windows/Mac/etc. experience though, you could test speed and accuracy of mouse targeting for a variety of different target sizes and locations, on various screen sizes, and try to figure out what trends/categories could be found among people’s preferences/performance.

Would also be interesting to try to do tests in context of e.g. a video game, or tasks in Photoshop, or whatever.

davkol

24 Nov 2014, 10:09

Is there even positive acceleration in OS X? I had to use a macintrash with the huge 2560×something screen last year in a lab, and it was a PITA. I refused to touch the sticky, gross Mighty Mouse (it tended to scroll upside down and do other weird stuff anyway), and connected my Logitech TrackMan Wheel. Oops, not the greatest improvement, except for hygiene. Whenever I let the ball turn freely, it'd make a sluggish cursor movement that reminded me of extreme smoothing; OTOH the same ball motion would result in cursor flying across the screen rapidly in X.Org or MS Windows Vista+.

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