Setting mouse speed under X.

Posted by Steve on Sat 2 Oct 2004 at 17:15

For some reason on some of the machines I look after there are wildly different mouse setups. On some machines moving the mouse will result in a painfully small, slow, movement of the pointer. On others there will be a blur of activity as the mouse streaks across the screen!

The way to set the mouse speed, without having to modify your mouse module (if used) or XFree86/X.org configuration is to use the xset command which is contained in the xbase-clients package.

This command can be used to set the speed and acceleration properties of your mouse as follows: xset m speed accel.

These values can be either integers '1', '2', '3', etc, or fractions '1/3', '3/4', etc.

Experimentation may be in order but I find that using '2' gives a good movement:

skx@lappy:~$ xset m 2 2

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This article is copyright 2004 Steve - please ask for permission to republish or translate.