Mouse Accelerated Scroll

By Xah Lee. Date: .

What is Mouse Accelerated Scroll?

Accelerated Scroll is a feature of mouse scroll-wheel. If you scroll much more if you turn the wheel fast.

This is a great feature, because you can scroll just a few lines, or scroll many pages, depending on how fast you swipe the wheel.

How to Test If You Have Accelerated Scroll?

  1. Goto a long static page: Xah keyboard Blog
  2. Put finger on wheel at one end. Slowly move wheel till finger reach the other end.
  3. Now goto top of web page and do again but very fast. Do you see big difference?

Note, you need to test on a web page that does not use JavaScript to control scroll. Twitter facebook etc uses JavaScript to mess your scroll. (because they want to track where you read.)

Which Operating System Have System-Wide Accelerated Scroll?

So, if you are on Linux, then the spin wheel becomes very useful. [see Mouse with Spin Wheel]

Microsoft removed accelerated scroll in Windows 10, version 2004

Microsoft removed accelerated scroll in Windows 10, version 2004 (released around May 2020). Now you need to download their “Mouse and Keyboard Center” software, and works for Microsoft mouse only.

mouse wheel acceleration 2021-02-27
[https://superuser.com/questions/101482/global-scroll-acceleration-in-windows]

What is Autoscroll?

“Autoscroll” is a software feature of the mouse on Microsoft Windows.

On a web browser page, hold down middle button, then move mouse to pan (move) the page in any direction.

Linux: No Accelerated Scroll and No Autoscroll

On Linux, there is no system-wide mouse wheel acceleration. It's app-dependent, and very few apps implements that.

Worse, in Firefox or Google Chrome, there is no “autoscroll” feature. Without accelerated scroll, you can work around with autoscroll. That is, press middle button, then move mouse to pan-scroll. The rate is dependent on your mouse position. You can turn this on in Firefox, but not in Google Chrome.

See: Firefox: Set Mouse Autoscroll, Linux

How to Chose a Mouse