Increase Mouse Sensitivity on a Mac

Have you maxed our your mouse tracking speed on your Mac but it’s still not fast enough for you? It can be annoying if you have bought a new mouse but you still can’t get the speed just right. Well there is a way to increase the speed manually to suit your needs.

1. Open up a Terminal window. This can be found under Applications > Utilities

2. Enter the following commands to see what your current mouse scaling speed is set to. For me, with the tracking bar maxed out in ‘System Preferences > Mouse’ the value returned was 3.0

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

3. To increase the tracking speed you just need to increase the number of the scaling setting. This can be done with the following code

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling [mouse speed]

4. Just replace mouse speed with the number you would like to set the speed at. I set my to 5.0 and it was perfect. See example below.

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling 5.0

5. Once you have done this you may need to restart your Mac for the changes to take effect.