Kill Mac OS X Mouse Acceleration from the command line
You might be asking yourself, what’s mouse acceleration? Essentially mouse acceleration is an algorithm that is deployed in an attempt to make mouse movements feel “natural”. For many PC users, when you first use a Mac, it becomes quite obvious that the mouse is behaving very differently. It will feel sluggish, unpredictable and unresponsive (to varying degrees depending on the user). This type of acceleration “curve” (as they call it) is useful when using a trackpad device, but very problematic when using a “high performance” mouse such as a logitech gaming mouse. I was recently reminded of how problematic the OS X acceleration curve can be while playing the recently released (for the mac) Half-Life 2. Trying to navigate a first person shooter while mouse acceleration is enabled is a nightmare!
Rather than paying for a shareware application that does the same thing, try out this free command line utility.
In your terminal:
macpro:~ user$ curl -O http://ktwit.net/code/killmouseaccel
macpro:~ user$ chmod +x killmouseaccel
macpro:~ user$ ./killmouseaccel mouse
Voila. You have freed your cursor from the chains of a bad acceleration curve! If you would like to return to the old and sluggish mouse: open your system preferences, go to the mouse section and click on the “Tracking” slider. If you aren’t convinced it’s back to normal, just reboot.
You can read more about mouse acceleration including some other ways to adjust it.