Disabling cursor acceleration causes stuck cursor in universal control

[xujames]

Cursor gets stuck top left on secondary (linked) screens whenever linear mouse has disable cursor acceleration option checked. Unchecking the option fixes the issue

Tested on macOS 12.3 / iOS 15.4 betas (21E5227a , 19E5241a)

[lujjjh]

Thank you for reporting this!

I haven't tried it yet. But I'm guessing it's a bug in the beta versions of universal control, and we'll see if it's fixed in future versions.

Under the hood, disabling cursor acceleration actually updates cursor acceleration to -1. As a result, if universal control fails to handle the special value correctly, the cursor might become stuck in the upper left corner.

If so, unchecking 'Disable cursor acceleration & sensitivity' and manually setting cursor acceleration to zero could be a workaround.

[kodek]

For what it's worth, I ran into the same problem when using SteerMouse. The author said it's likely an Apple issue. I haven't confirmed if the final release has the same issue, though.

[jjakucyk]

I just upgraded my two macs to Monterey 12.3 and I noticed that scroll direction and acceleration preferences do not transfer to the other device through Universal Control. Even though I have Linearmouse installed on both, if I use Universal Control to move my cursor from one to the other, the scroll direction is wrong, and it's using the system scrolling acceleration whereas I use a fixed number of lines. Maybe this is a symptom of the same problem?

[lujjjh]

@jjakucyk Thank you for your detailed information!

According to your description, neither of LinearMouse apps on your two Macs appears to have received scrolling events in Universal Control, so LinearMouse will be unable to modify these events.

I'm not sure how Universal Control is implemented; perhaps these events are lower-level and bypass the CGEventTaps, and I don't have any extra Macs to test it on right now.

This issue, I believe, is also present in similar apps. It would be helpful if someone could find a similar app that works in Universal Control.

[David-van-der-Sluijs]

@jjakucyk to resolve that particular issue you need to enable natural scrolling in your iPads settings by going into General > Trackpad & Mouse > Natural Scrolling

Edit: This apparently only applies to the trackpad

[jjakucyk]

@SlateDave I'm not using an iPad it's a MacBook Pro, and I do want natural scrolling enabled for the trackpad, but not for the mouse (which is a primary feature of LinearMouse), so changing that isn't really an option.

I noticed that on the MacBook I had natural scrolling turned on (System Preferences) and reverse scrolling turned on (LinearMouse), as you would expect for my desired use case. On the iMac however I had natural scrolling off and reverse scrolling off. Enabling both of those on the iMac fixes the Universal Control issue, but some apps that use the mouse wheel to zoom are reversed, regardless of whether I'm using Universal Control or directly with the mouse. This was a problem on the MacBook even before the Universal Control issue. AutoCAD LT 2022 is one example, as is Capture One Pro 11. I am upgrading to Capture One Pro 22 (it's really version 15) and that zooms fine. Google Maps also works fine, so maybe AutoCAD is using a different/older API. I just downloaded AutoCAD 2023 and it still exhibits the issue (they finally upgraded it to using the Metal graphics engine, but it's not yet a universal binary). If it weren't for the AutoCAD zooming (I only use it on the iMac) then I could just enable natural scrolling and reverse scrolling on the iMac and be done with it. I suspect there could be some other apps that use the mouse wheel to zoom that would be affected too though.

[github-actions]

This issue is stale because it has been open 60 days with no activity. Remove stale label or comment or this will be closed in 5 days.

[lujjjh]

I'm not sure if it's stale. Need more feedback.