Speed up Mouse Tracking on Mac OS X

One of my gripes when using a mac was that I could never get my mouse to track fast enough. Even the highest option available in the System Preferences wasn't fast enough for me. Especially when you're using an external monitor, and if it's quite large, your mouse pad would not be big enough for your mouse to roam in order to get from one corner of your screen to the other.  Generally, I just want to keep my hand movement to minimal. ;) Here is a solution that worked for me.

1. Open a Terminal Window. 

You can Spotlight for "terminal"

2. Check your mouse speed.

Enter the following command to see what your current setting is:

defaults read -g com.apple.mouse.scaling

This will return a numeric value, the speed of your mouse.

3. Set your mouse speed

To speed up (or slow down) your mouse tracking, you can simply change this number accordingly by typing the following command, replacing the “your_mouse_speed” with a new number such as 5.0. Notice that read has been changed to write:

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling your_mouse_speed

The maximum mouse speed on mac desktops is 3.0 (when maxed out in system preferences). I use 5.0 and it works well for me.

defaults write -g com.apple.mouse.scaling  5.0

You may need to restart your mac to see the changes take effect.

Hope that helps.