Tuesday, April 06, 2010

How to disable lateral (horizontal) scrolling on a Magic mouse

Things that seem like a good idea at the time but aren't really:
  • auto-orientation on my iPhone: Mostly it guesses wrong.
  • horizontal scrolling surface on the magic mouse: Mostly it guesses wrong.
There is a way to disable the Magic Mouse horizontal scrolling:
Apple - Support - Discussions - Magic Mouse - Disable horizontal ...
... This worked for me. It's a relief to disable horizontal scrolling. Just to clarify the previous post:

To turn horizontal scrolling off:

defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool NO

To turn horizontal scrolling on:

defaults write com.apple.driver.AppleBluetoothMultitouch.mouse MouseHorizontalScroll -bool YES

These commands are entered on the command line of the Terminal utility application.
You must either restart your computer or connect and disconnect your mouse for these changes to take effect. To connect/disconnect you power cycle the mouse; it's helpful to have the OS X mouse pref pane open to see when it's disconnected and reconnected. Reconnection can be slow.

It's beautiful to have lateral scrolling disabled. Just beautiful.

Update 6/17/10: Even with lateral scrolling disabled, I still came to despise the Magic Mouse. Finally I gave up on it.

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