BetterMouse

What is it?

It’s a macOS utility app, to improve external mouse performance and functionalities, aiming for replacing bulky, intrusive, and resource-hungry mouse drivers like Logitech Options. It’s feature-rich, lightweighted, efficiency-optimized, and perfectly privacy-safe, trying to meet all your needs for using a 3rd-party mouse on macOS.

Features

Scroll

  • Butter smooth scroll, with fully configurable settings of duration, direction, acceleration, etc.
  • Precise configurable discrete scroll with or without acceleration.
  • Shift-scroll to horizontal on/off, with configurable speed, and direction.
  • Trackpad like free-scroll by panning with arbitrary buttons, to idle your scroll wheel. Ctrl-pan to zoom, Cmd-pan to speedup.
  • Ctrl-scroll to zoom/pinch, Cmd-scroll to speedup.
  • Thumbwheel zoom for hi-res thumbwheel.

Cursor

  • Separated cursor acceleration & speed control, acceleration can be completely eliminated.
  • Precise mouse fps counter.
  • Per mouse settings of DPI, onboard profiles, scroll wheel & thumb wheel for supported Logi mice.
  • A unifying & bolt receiver pairing tool included.

Button/gesture mapping

  • Mapping every extra button click/drag/long-press to any keyboard shortcuts & extensive special actions.
  • Modifier keyed button/gesture mapping.
  • Click-through feature for left/right click for direct actions to inactive windows with one click.
  • Click-through option for every mapping independently.
  • Multishot shortcuts for button gestures/long-press.
  • Unique fast version of spaces switching, mission control actions.

Keyboard

  • General hotkey bindings.
  • Programmable custom key mapping per keyboard.
  • System level physical key to key substitutions.

Exception apps

  • Per-app independent settings for scroll setting & button/gesture mapping.

App

  • Menu bar app with the hide-able app icon.
  • Clean & safe, with no custom network access, and no file access.
  • Notarized regular app, doesn’t install any extension, driver, daemon or agent, you name it. Doesn’t spawn any file(except for the config file generated by OS in the default location).
  • Continuously optimized algorithm with the best in class low CPU & power usage.
  • 7 Days full feature free trial, one-time purchase for a lifetime.

Installation

Same as any other app, unzip the file you downloaded, and move the BetterMouse.app to your /Applications folder, done.

When the first run, it needs accessibility permission, it’s a necessity for all these kinds of apps. Enable it in System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Privacy -> Accessibility.

To uninstall it, just move the BetterMouse.app file in your Applications folder to the recycle bin.

Troubleshooting

1. The app acts weird/not as expected or some features have no effect:

  • This app needs a clean running environment where no other mouse helper apps are running, or they may interfere with each other. For example the Options+ or the GHub. To completely remove the Logi Options+, run the Terminal command: “sudo /Library/Application\ Support/Logitech.localized/LogiOptionsPlus/logioptionsplus_agent.app/Contents/Frameworks/logioptionsplus_updater.app/Contents/MacOS/logioptionsplus_updater –full –uninstall”

  • Messed-up configurations can also lead to malfunctions. In this case, save your config to a file and load it back again. When you load config from a file, the app will erase the current config first.

2. Run at login doesn’t work:

Items in the System settings->General->Login items list may be the records you run your app from different paths earlier, which usually cause the “Run at login” not to work.

Removing all BetterMouse items in the login items list, if there are any. Then check the Run at login toggle in the app again. That usually does the trick.

Version 1.5.4028, 31 Aug 2023
macOS 11.0 minimum, Intel/Apple silicon universal
File size: 3.93MB

7 days free trial
one-time purchase for life for $7.99
5 devices per license

Version 1.5.4028

Add scroll left/right actions for button click. The cursor hold is improved to only affect bound gestures. Thumb wheel horizontal scroll bug fixes. Cmd-scroll crash fixes. Click-through compatibility improved. Download

Version 1.5.3963

Concurrent gestures supported. Gestures get v-synced to reduce resource usage. Combine current running apps into the app launch submenu. Scroll panel UI rearranged. UI for cmd scroll/zoom/pan settings added. An option for the ctrl-scroll direction was added. Thumb wheel action bug fixes. A speed gain setting for thumb wheel actions was added. Various bug fixes. Download

Version 1.5.3792

Bugs regarding right long press & pan fixes. Download

Version 1.5.3769

Expand panning to arbitrary buttons, with modifier keys optionally. Add panning direction inversion. Malfunction fixes and unperceivable performance improvements. Download

Version 1.5.3742

A few more crash bug fixes. Efficiency improvements. Download

Version 1.5.3712

Fixed a bug regarding keyboards disconnecting. Fixed a bug for cmd-scroll wouldn’t speed up in no-acc scroll mode. Improved compatibility for button clicks. Download

Version 1.5.3700

Add multishot for hotkey actions of directional gestures.

Version 1.5.3673

Bug fixes regarding per-app button binding. Download

Version 1.5.3669

Add “app launch” in the action menu.

Version 1.5.3642

Added 4 binding actions of Sleep, Logout, Screen off and Lock screen. Added general keyboard binding & keyboard-specific key binding. Added cmd-scroll & cmd-pan for higher speed, with no UI. Download

Version 1.5.3497

Fixed a bug of false triggering of gestures. Fixed the bug of the run at login display. Simplified the thumbwheel function selection to parallel 4 options. Expand the thumbwheel as button functionality with the long press and left/right gestures. Device initializations speed up. Battery level display for some new mice supported. The rachet disengagement point slider range has been adjusted to align with the original…