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Comment by Daniel_Newby | Hacker News Reader

Crank up the mouse acceleration?

Then it becomes an issue to hit buttons. As the screen resolution grows, the percentage of the screen area that the button takes up shrinks. If you increase the speed of the mouse to compensate for the size of the screen, it makes hitting precise targets more difficult.

That's what mouse acceleration is for (in comparison with mouse speed) - acceleration deals with when you move the mouse slowly it moves slowly for precision use, but when you move it quickly it moves faster than a linear proportional speedup of the slow movement.

When it's not right, the end result is moving the mouse quickly to get near a button, then slowing down and the cursor slows down more and you both miss the button and get annoyed that it's only creeping ever more slowly towards it like a digital Zeno's arrow.

Yes, that has been my main problem with acceleration, I have never been able to set it to be able to move consistently across the screen in both wide swaths and with precision. Partial work around: using a trackball. The ball has momentum, so I can give it a spin and it will continue to roll. However, this brings up a new issue. Trackballs make mousing in relatively straight lines much more difficult, make image editing a real PITA.

Really, most of the screen real estate is completely uninteresting from the perspective of the mouse. Contextual gestures, where sliding the mouse changes the selected control point, I think has potential.

Maybe it's different in OS X, but my (admittedly single) large screen doesn't pose a problem. If I'm mousing from one corner to another, I move the mouse more definitively and I cross the screen in 3.5 inches of mouse travel (just tested). When I'm near a button I move the mouse more tentatively, and one inch of cursor travel corresponds to an entire inch of mouse travel.

So it's not just cursor speed, but acceleration that matters. And if it's implemented properly, I don't think your issue would be an issue at all.

OSX acceleration is quite different from others. I'm not sure what their curve is, but I really like it. I took to it in a couple seconds, and I'm faster (ie, speed to do action, so accuracy plays in heavily) with my trackpad than most people are with mice.

Odd. I have two 1920x1280 monitors (arranged as yours). With my mouse acceleration I can go from extreme left to extreme right without much effort (don't have to lift my palm off the desk). Yet I can easily hit small targets a few pixels across. Buttons are easy.

This is on Windows - haven't switch to Mac to test it - maybe the OS X acceleration is linear and hence a bit sucky?

Mac OS has even more acceleration than Windows by default. That's a common complaint among new Mac users, who often incorrectly and adamantly insist both that Windows has a linear mapping where 1 inch on the mouse pad equals N inches on the screen, and that that is the right way to do it.

Not really an issue on my mac with two 1280x1024 displays. I can span both monitors in about 2-3 inches of mouse movement. Some people really like text-based input though, which explains the popularity of Apps like Quicksilver.

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