DiscreteScroll For Mac

For a while now, Mac users have been having problems with their non-Apple mice's scroll acceleration as it will not work as expected, scrolling one line at a time when rotating the scroll wheel slowly.

Instead, the default behavior in macOS is to apply immediate acceleration to the scrolling action, making everything in the scroll area fly by, instead of slowly and steadily scrolling it by, line after line.

Throughout the years since the release of OS X 10.9, Mac users who own(ed) non-Apple mice have been continuously reporting that they have encountered this exact issue.

Thankfully, there is a solution now: the open source DiscreteScroll application which runs in the background and throws out a simple event tap to prevent the automatic acceleration behavior.

From the DiscreteScroll download area, you can get three different builds of the app, capable of scrolling one, two or three lines with each tick of your mouse's scroll wheel.

If you have the necessary expertise, you can also edit the app's source code and modify it to scroll as many lines as you need it to, in case the available options are not appropriate.

DiscreteScroll is a faceless application which stays in the background at all times chugging along and making sure your mouse works as it should be. It will start doing its job right after being launched, and you can make sure that it's there by opening the Activity Monitor app and searching for it.

It is important to mention that it will not affect the way your Mac's trackpad works as it is not a non-continuous scrolling device like your mouse.

On the whole, DiscreteScroll worked as advertised, eliminating the annoying scroll acceleration "feature" behavior, but it would benefit from a small menu bar item or preference pane which would give the user the options to automatically launch the app on login and to disable it when needed.

On the other hand, you can also set it to start on its own on system load by adding DiscreteScroll to the Login Items list in the Users & Groups system preference pane.