For those of you on a large screen, such as the 27” iMac, you may feel that the mouse moves a little bit too slowly—even at the highest speed setting. I don’t notice it so much when using the Mac for day-to-day stuff, but when using Aperture, where I’m constantly mousing from edge to edge of the screen, it was becoming tedious.

I’d installed System Preferences add-ons before and never been pleased with them. Somehow, the mouse just felt “wrong”. Perhaps they had a bad acceleration curve, but they never really felt good to me. In frustration the other night I set out looking for another one, and found the perfect solution. And it’s already built into your Mac.

The No-Fat Solution

It turns out that you can modify the maximum speed of your mouse by simply entering a command into Terminal. By default your max speed is 3.0 (whatever that means, I have no idea—3.0 hamsters per inch, perhaps?), but you can change that. I’ve changed mine to 5.0, and am loving it.

The instructions to do this are simple, and are posted on Tyler Nichols Weblog—the article you want is titled “Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X”. The post dates back to 2007, but has been updated to note that it does work with the new Magic Mouse (which I’m using). After a few days of running with the faster speed, I’m happy to say that it feels fantastic!

If you’re frustrated by a too-slow mouse in Aperture, this is the most elegant solution I’ve ever seen to speed it up.

Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X on Tyler Nichols Weblog