What is it?

It’s a macOS utility app that gives you smooth mouse scrolling, cursor speed control, and powerful mouse/keyboard bindings. It aims to replace bulky, intrusive and resource-hungry mouse drivers like Logitech Options. It’s feature-rich, lightweight, efficiency-optimized, and most importantly, privacy-safe. We’re trying to meet all your 3rd-party mouse/keyboard needs on macOS.

Features

Scroll

• Butter smooth scrolling with fully configurable settings for duration, direction, acceleration, etc.
• Precisely configurable discrete scrolling with or without acceleration.
• Mouse drag panning, a more convenient way to scroll, you don’t even need a scroll wheel.
• Scroll with modifier keys for H-scroll, zoom or speed up/down.
• Configurable thumbwheel for zoom, scroll, or action binding for Logi MX Master series.

Mouse hardware

• Separated cursor acceleration & speed control, acceleration can be completely disabled.
• Accurate mouse fps counter.
• In-depth mouse hardware settings of DPI, onboard profiles, vendor-defined buttons, thumbwheel, etc for supported Logi mice.
• A unifying & bolt receiver pairing tool included.

Mouse button/gesture mapping

• All mouse button click, drag, hold and hold-scroll (with optional modifier keys) can be mapped to keyboard shortcuts & rich special actions.
• Click-through for left/right click. Click-through and multi-shot for each mapped action individually.
• Unique fast version of spaces switching, mission control actions.

Keyboard

• General hotkey maps.
• Vendor-defined key mapping for supported Logi keyboards, with some hardware settings such as backlight, fn inversion and onboard profiles.
• Physical key-to-key substitutions at the system level.

Exception apps

• Per-app settings for scrolling, mouse button, and keyboard mapping.

App

• Apple-notarized regular app, doesn’t install any extensions, drivers, or agents. Doesn’t spawn any files (except for the OS-generated config file in the default location).
• Clean & safe, with no custom network access, and no file access.
• Menu bar app with the hide-able app icon.
• Completely non-sticky to your system, dragging the app to the trash is all you need to uninstall it without leaving any residue.
• Continuously optimized algorithm with the best in class low CPU & power consumption.
• 7-day free trial with full functionality, one-time purchase for a lifetime.

Installation

No installation required. Unzip the downloaded file and move it to your /Applications folder and you’re ready to go.

It will ask for accessibility permission the first time you run it, it’s a necessity for all these kinds of apps that have global controls outside the app itself. Enable it in System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> Accessibility.

To uninstall, simply drag the app from your Applications folder to the Trash.

Troubleshooting

1. When I launch the app, nothing happens.

• If all goes well, you should see a mouse icon in the menu bar at the top of your screen. Click on it to open the main panel.

2. 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+, the GHub, or the even worse LogiTune. 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
  
  
• If you want to be sure before uninstalling anything, you can go to System Settings ->Privacy & Security -> Accessibility, and disable suspicious apps temporarily to find the culprit.
  
  
• Messed-up configurations can also lead to malfunctions. In this case, save your config to a file and reload it. When you load a config from a file, the app will first erase the current config to clean things up.

3. Run at login doesn’t work:

• Item in the System settings->General->Login items list may be the entry you used to run the app from different paths before, which usually causes the “Run at login” to not work.
  
  Remove all BetterMouse entries in the login items list, if there are any. Then check the Run at login checkbox in the app again. This usually does the trick.

4. The “Vertical dir invert” doesn’t work:

• For some reason we don’t yet know, this occasionally happens when users run the app for the first time. Restarting your Mac usually fix the problem.

5. I can’t click on the drop-down menu in app XXX:

• The left-click-through feature may be a bit radical, which can interfere with many large apps that have their own mouse interpreter, such as design software, games, and virtual machines.
  
  You’ll want to create exceptions for these apps and disable left-click-through in their button binding panel if you find anomalies, usually drop-down lists that can’t be clicked or don’t disappear.
  
  You may also want to disable smooth scrolling, panning, and even all mouse button and keyboard bindings in case something unexpected happens in these apps.
  
  If you can’t click on the top menu bar in a full-screen space and you need it, you’ll need to disable the global left-click-through in the Buttons tab.

6. The gesture button/Ratchet mode button stops working after sleep:

• It’s usually a random Bluetooth glitch that causes the mouse to fail to initialize. To fix this, simply turn your mouse off and on again. You can also use the USB receiver instead to prevent this from happening again.

7. Beach ball/freezing:

• A possible cause of this problem could be the “Allow in the background” permission. When the app is upgraded to a new version, some code that requires permission may also change, we guess the OS thought it needed to be re-permitted and somehow the request never shows up.
  
  Disabling the BetterMouse entry in System Settings -> General -> Login Items -> Allow in the Background should fix this. Turning it back on shouldn’t cause the problem again.

8. Mouse/keyboard hardware settings disappear from the Mouse/Keyboard tabs:

• This is usually caused by corrupted settings on the disk. Settings can be corrupted by app crashes or other accidents like the beach ball.
  
  Saving and loading your settings once can clean up the possible messes because the app will first erase the current settings on disk before loading a new one.
  
  The “Wipe out all settings” button does the same cleanup without loading. Use this button only if you want to manually rebuild your configuration from scratch.

9. Is it possible to hide the Better Mouse icon from the dock?

• The app has the nature to hide its icon, but it’s organized by the OS. If the “recent” section of your Dock is less than 3 items or so, macOS seems to tend to fill it with icons that should be hidden.