How to set a different scroll direction for mouse and trackpad on Mac

Why the mouse and the trackpad share one setting

Natural scrolling came to the Mac with Mac OS X Lion in 2011, and it made scrolling work like a touchscreen: move your fingers up and the page moves up with them, the way a sheet of paper would under your hand. On a trackpad that feels right, because your fingers are, in effect, on the page.

A mouse wheel is a different gesture. You aren’t touching the page; you’re turning a wheel, and years of PCs taught most hands that rolling it towards you moves down the document. With natural scrolling on, rolling it towards you moves the other way, which is why so many people switch natural scrolling off the day they plug a mouse into a Mac.

The catch is that macOS keeps natural scrolling as one setting for every pointing device. The switch appears in both System Settings → Mouse and System Settings → Trackpad, but they are two views of the same switch: turn it off for the mouse and the trackpad goes with it.

What you can do with macOS alone

Pick the one you mind least. Leave natural scrolling on and retrain your hand on the wheel, or turn it off and live with a trackpad that scrolls the old way. Plenty of people settle here. If you move between a laptop’s trackpad and a desk mouse every day, though, one of the two always feels wrong.

Flip the switch when you change device. Turn natural scrolling off when you sit down at the desk and back on when you take the laptop away. It works, until the day you forget and the first scroll goes the wrong way.

Look in the mouse maker’s software. Some mouse makers’ apps have a scroll direction setting of their own for their mice. If yours does, check whether it fixes that mouse before you add anything else.

Scroll sideways with Shift. Not a fix for direction, but worth knowing: on a mouse whose wheel only goes up and down, holding Shift while you roll it scrolls left and right in most apps.

A direction for each device

MacFixes Pro sets the direction per device instead of for the whole Mac: natural or standard for the trackpad, for the Magic Mouse and for a mouse with a wheel, each on its own. Left and right can be set too, not only up and down.

It leaves macOS’s own switch alone. Set Natural scrolling in System Settings however you like; MacFixes flips only the devices you’ve set the other way, and a device set the same way as macOS is left as it is. So the usual setup — natural on the trackpad, standard on the wheel — takes one choice: leave macOS on natural and set the wheel mouse to standard.

Telling the devices apart is the hard part. A trackpad and a Magic Mouse are both touch surfaces that scroll with momentum, so MacFixes tells them apart by the touches on each surface. It also keeps one direction for a whole scroll, momentum included, so a flick doesn’t change direction half-way through as it coasts to a stop.

If scrolling still feels wrong

Direction is only part of how a wheel feels on a Mac. If a clicky wheel jumps in coarse steps, or a fast spin sends the page flying, smooth scrolling and linear scrolling change how far and how smoothly each notch moves. Both change notched mouse wheels only and leave the trackpad and the Magic Mouse alone, so they sit happily alongside a per-device direction.

For the rest of the mouse, give the middle and side buttons their own actions. And if you use 3D or CAD apps on the trackpad, where the view orbits with a middle-button drag a trackpad doesn’t have, slide three fingers to orbit instead.

Permissions, and turning it off

More fixes macOS doesn’t give you

One of 47 fixes and 10 apps in MacFixes. Every fix · Every app · Something else your Mac won’t do? Request it.