Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Mouse

This pane looks different depending on what kind of mouse (if any) is attached to your Mac.

Tracking Speed, Double-Click Speed

It may surprise you that the cursor on the screen doesn’t move 5 inches when you move the mouse 5 inches on the desk. Instead, the cursor moves farther when you move the mouse faster.

How much farther depends on how you set the first slider here. The Fast setting is nice if you have an enormous monitor, since you don’t need an equally large mouse pad to get from one corner to another. The Slow setting, on the other hand, forces you to pick up and put down the mouse frequently as you scoot across the screen. It offers very little acceleration, but it can be great for highly detailed work like pixel-by-pixel editing in Photoshop.

The Double-Click Speed setting specifies how much time you have to complete a double-click. If you click too slowly—beyond the time you’ve allotted yourself with this slider—the Mac “hears” two single clicks instead.

Note

On a laptop without any mouse attached, the Mouse pane still appears in System Preferences—but its sole function is to help you “pair” your Mac with a wireless Bluetooth mouse. At that point, the Mouse pane looks just as it does on a desktop Mac.

The Mighty Mouse and Magic Mouse

Just by looking, you’d never know that these Apple mice have both a right button and a left button. Once you turn on the two-button feature in System Preferences (Figure 15-11), though, each side clicks independently.

The Magic Mouse is especially ...