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OS X Lion mouse and trackpad scrolling
There’s no other way to say it – It’s up side down!
Here is a quick tip that can get you scrolling the right/old way.
Go into System Preferences for either your mouse or trackpad and you’ll see there’s an option there for scrolling. In the screen shot above, its the very top option. Turn off natural scrolling and you’re back to the way you used to be.
Me, well I’m going to leave the Lion natural scrolling turned on for a few days to see if I can break the old habit!
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
It isn’t upside-down. If you have a trackpad, here’s the fastest way to get used to the new way of scrolling.
Put two fingers on your monitor screen and pretend it’s a giant iPhone. Now try to scroll down. Common sense says you touch the screen and push the page up. Once you make that connection, you’ll find yourself instantly doing the same thing on your trackpad. After a while, it’ll be second nature.
Rob, I didn’t think of it like that, nice analogy
The one beef I have with this is that the mouse and trackpad are seen as one device. If you go into system preferences, click on “Mouse” and then make it scroll in the classic direction, the Trackpad automatically takes the same setting.
Vice versa it’s the same. You go into “Trackpad”, change the setting to or from “Natural” scrolling, and the Mouse automatically adopts that setting.
Since the Mouse and Trackpad are listed as two devices, and are two physically different input devices, I see no reason why anyone would automatically link those configuration settings.
It does make sense for me to scroll down when rolling down on the mouse while it also eminently makes sense to scroll down while swiping up on the Trackpad.
This is a major design flaw in MacOS/X Lion. If a device is both physically and logically different from the next device, the OS should treat these devices as separately configurable.
Anyone know of any way to get around that?
Hi Chris,
100% Agree with you! Seems like a ‘bug’ to me as well… I have just the app to fix it though
http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/
You can configure both the trackpad and mouse separately
Cheers
Josh
That’s perfect, thank you!
Ok, almost perfect. It actually doesn’t seem to work to reverse the horizontal scrolling, so you can’t get the same swiping between desktops and apps that you get with the “natural” scrolling in the OS.
Here’s a workaround, though:
Set your scrolling in the System Preferences to “natural”, and use the Scroll Reverser to reverse just the vertical scrolling and just for your mouse. The Scroll Reverser just reverses it from whatever the OS is using, so that will just double-reverse your scroll wheel to be normal, and still give you natural scrolling with the track pad.
Oh, thank you so much for this app!
My big problem is that the natural way to scroll with a mouse is different than the natural way to scroll with the trackpad…but they share the same properties, and there is no way to set their properties independently. So no matter which setting I use, one of them is always incorrect. So when I switch (mouse for photoshop and programming, trackpad for browsing and general computer use), I always have to change the properties
Hi did you see the link that Josh posted above?
That app may help you configure the mouse and trackpad independantly (http://pilotmoon.com/scrollreverser/)
Thanks for the app! Although it would be nice not to have another app running to do what apple should have done to start with, which is recognise the difference between a mouse and a trackpad! They say they changed it in Lion to be “natural” for a trackpad. Did they forget that people use mice too!
Oh my gosh, thank you. I just installed Lion and i was going nuts trying to figure out how to “fix” the upside-down scroll!!