How to set scroll direction independently for mouse and trackpad on Macbook
The issue with OS X and external “not-magic” mouses is when you connect normal mouse and scroll direction is set to “Natural” it feels reversed.
Yet when using same Macbook with trackpad, “Natural” is perfect. There is a thread on Apple’s forum about this issue yet no real answers there. You can Google around and won’t find anything useful as well. The answer to this — you can not set scroll direction independently for those devices and that’s “by design”. I guess it’s to make sure you use actual Apple products to have UX which was designed by Apple and this is the way for Apple to avoid all kind of cross-brand issues which you find on other devices.
In short, you can’t and probably won’t be able to do this ever. Yet I still have a solution for you:
I created a tiny application which does the following:
- Opens the System Preferences
- Clicks on the checkbox to toggle “natural” direction option
If interested, here is all the code:
Download the application
I built the script to be a runnable application for easy use. Also added an icon. So you can download it zipped from my GitHub repo.
Here is a link to the zip file. Open the link and click “Download”.
While app requires access to accessibility settings to click the checkbox, it will throw some errors after first run. Just run, close the errors and provide access and run again. Here is step-by-step:
Step 1: Double click on zip file to unzip it. Run the app. First run will provide such error, no worries, just click “Ok” to close.
You need to provide automated access to click the checkbox.
Step 2: Open System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, then in Privacy tab select Accessibility and enable mouse_direction app.
When you checked the checkbox, close this.
Step 3: Run the app again. It will run once and close itself when done. It’s quick, so you may not even notice it was open. Check your scroll direction and run app again. It should toggle from “natural” to “normal” direction on each run.
Step 4: To make sure to not lost the application, drag to Applications directory and from there drag from Applications to Dock for one-click access.
Now you are one click away from changing the scroll direction 🎉
Troubleshooting
If you get error that application is broken — have you renamed it? Or modified in any other way? Just unzip, drag to Applications and then from Applications to Dock.
