Mousetrap
The final question comes from Alex:
“When I’m sat at my desk I can’t stand typing on the cramped keyboard of my 11in MacBook Air. I bought the Apple Magic Keyboard with the numeric keypad on the side, and that’s much better. I bought the Magic Mouse 2 at the same time but that’s not been such a great experience. I find myself accidentally scrolling around all over the place. I looked for options to tame this behaviour in System Preferences but the control seems limited. Are there any secret hacks that can help?”
You’re not alone, Alex. Some people really take to the Magic Mouse 2 (or its non-rechargeable predecessor), but others find they are forever making accidental swipes and clicks. I’m in that latter group – I nearly returned my Magic Mouse soon after I bought it. However, I have a friend who loves hers and finds the control very natural. She thinks I’m mad and vice versa. I found my level of annoyance varied by application. When browsing the web or checking emails, it was fine, but when using Excel I found the cursor accidentally scrolling all over the place.
To my mind, there are two issues. Firstly, the top surface of the mouse is one big touchpad. That’s fine normally, but the problems come when you keep switching between the laptop’s proper trackpad and the trackpad-like top surface of the mouse, because they behave quite differently. On the laptop, one finger moves the pointer around and two fingers scroll things, whereas with the Magic Mouse it’s moving the mouse around that moves the pointer and just one finger on the mouse top scrolls. If you keep chopping and changing between the laptop trackpad and the mouse, you have to keep changing your mindset and overriding your muscle memory.
The second issue is that it’s very hard to use a button-less mouse without accidentally rolling your finger around as you tap and click, meaning (if you’re anything like me) you always end up with some unwanted scroll movement.
What’s interesting is that the friend who thinks I’m mad, and loves her Magic Mouse, uses an iMac Pro rather than a laptop. So she never flits between the two di ffe rent s tyle of touch surface. Perhaps that’s it?
Anyway, help is at hand both for me and, hopefully, for Alex via a handy utility called BetterTouchTool which you’ll find at folivora.ai. Many online resources will point you towards an alternative utility called MagicPrefs instead, but I can’t recommend that because it’s very old and is no longer being updated, whereas BetterTouchTool is actively maintained.
With BetterTouchTool (which is more usually referred to simply as
BTT in Mac circles), you have much more control over the Magic Mouse – incidentally, it also offers options for the Magic Trackpad and the Touch Bar that sits at the top of the keyboard with newer Macs.
Using BTT, I’m able to turn off single finger scrolling and use twofinger scrolling on the mouse surface instead. This means that the mouse exactly mirrors the way that the laptop’s touchpad works. But there’s so much more to BTT than this: the degree of customisation available is incredible. Speed, force, duration – it’s all there and much more. There are even facilities for window snapping to the corners of your screen(s), and a screengrab facility
“Why shouldn’t we be able to use our stupidly expensive mouse how we want to?”